


Out of the tunnels

by willsolacepositivity



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: A lot of chapters, Also Klaus and Jon chaotic friendship rights, Angst, Crossover, Hurt/Comfort, Mikaele salesa and Allison get the competent work partner they deserve, Mikaele's job is very slightly changed, Multi, aka ben is done with everyone's bullshit, and Helen Gets Emotional(tm), klaus gives a statement, season 2 divergent, the magnus archives the umbrella academy crossover, tma tua crossover, yay!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:13:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27185017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willsolacepositivity/pseuds/willsolacepositivity
Summary: When time travel not only goes seriously wrong but throws you into an alternate reality, the Hargreeves family must learn to adapt to the new supernatural forces that rule the world to survive in the shady world surrounding the Magnus Institute, where being even slightly unusual gets you unwanted attention form the Powers That Be, and deal with a whole new type of impending apocalypse.
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonmartin - Relationship, Klaus Hargreeves/David "Dave" Katz, Klaus Hargreeves/Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims, Martin Blackwood/The Archivist, Vanya Hargreeves/ Melanie King
Comments: 30
Kudos: 71





	1. New Faces, New Fears (Five)

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter contains probably the biggest TMA spoiler (end of season 4), but the next few chapters take place in TMA season 2 and work their way up so be mindful of that. Okay!

Something about the jump felt off; Five noticed it. Normally, time jumps were like going up, but this one was somehow _sideways,_ as if they had turned time on its side, and were making their excruciating way through a rift in reality itself. There was no time to waste figuring it out, however, so Five just closed his eyes and prayed to whatever gods hadn’t yet abandoned them for the best. 

He stumbled down into what at first appeared to be a sewer, but as Five looked around he noticed that it seemed more like some sort of specialized tunnel system, with what looked to be the decomposed, stinking corpses of many worms lining the floor. Five expected to hear the various groans of stumbling around after a time jump; he himself had’t fared well after his last one, and his siblings wouldn’t have experienced anything like it. But as Five straightened up, he couldn’t hear or see any of them.

“Klaus? Diego? Luther?” He half-whispered, half-yelled. “Hello?” He started to run off to look for them, but the tunnels were long and winding, and Five tripped on something. He held it up, breathing heavily, and saw a bright white femur. Then, the thought hit Five- he might be the only one who made it out safe. 

All of a sudden, the strange tunnels seemed constraining, old, and musky, like a prison cell. In a way, that’s what it was about to become. He sank down, not caring about the worm corpses or general grime in the tunnels, and stared at the femur. Five saw the Apocalypse in his head again, everything on fire, him the only one who survived the impact, the corpses of his family stone-cold before him, eyes gazing unblinkingly into the distance. The pounding in Five’s head started up again, and his chest seemed to impole, as if someone had stuck a vacuum into his stomach. Five considered jumping, but he didn’t know these tunnels, so he sat there, staring at the femur, alone in the dark.

He had failed them again, hadn’t he? Five had come back, failed to save the world, and, worst of all, hadn’t saved the Umbrella Academy. There had been so much hope for all of them; Klaus had just gotten sober, Luther had found his own identity, Allison was so close to seeing her daughter again, as Five was sure that it was all somehow his fault that they had failed. The jump had _felt_ wrong; he should have stopped for a moment and redone the jump in his head. Or maybe, all Five had even done was wrong. 

He should have told them sooner, that’s what. Luther suspected something was wrong from the beginning, Diego had connections Five just didn’t, not without involving the Commision, Klaus had been fighting his own battles that needed Five’s help but still could have summoned Ben; they all could have saved the world, given more time. If Five had sucked it up and asked his siblings for help, maybe they would still be alive. Or if he had included Vanya, cared for her in the same way she had cared for him when she left those peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches for years after he left, she wouldn’t have turned to Leonard for support. Now, it was Five, his failure, and the femur.

“I’ll call you… Helen.” He decided, looking at the femur. After all; it would be his only company for a while, and if the Apocalypse had taught Five something, it was that everybody needed a companion, even if it was about as sentient as a mannequin.

“Ooh, you better not do that, that’s my name.” A voice responded. The voice- probably a woman’s- had a London accent, but seemed distorted and magnified in some way, as if playing through a corrupted tape recorder. Five looked up, and saw a woman. She was dressed in a spiky business suit like the Hadler had often worn, but it seemed to flow and shift colors. The woman- Helen- looked nothing like the handler either, from her dark skin tone and youthful face to the way her proportions flowed and edded, or her half-a-foot-long fingers topped with razor-sharp painted nails. Basically, there was a lot to take in.

“Who are you?” Five tensed up, preparing for a fight. 

“Well, I’ve already introduced myself, haven't I? I’m Helen. And you must be the Number Five of which the others have told me.” At this point, a door seemed to open in the wall. The closest Five had ever seen to it was bus seat carpeting, but what lay beyond the door was bus seat carpeting brought to life, shimmering, shifting, with impossible shapes even Five could never describe. But strangest of all, beyond the door was Klaus. 

It took Five a second to recognise his brother- Klaus had grown his hair out to his shoulders, and looked healthier than he had before, and had swapped out his usual piecemeal and garish clothes for a Union jack-printed shirt and sweater about seven sizes too big for him, along with unusually presentable jeans. However, he also looked more weather-beaten, and, something Five had never seen- his forearms were glowing blue.

“Hurry up, both of you! The Spiral tried to take me the entire time and Jon needs our help! The other Archival Assistants won’t make it in time!”

“Jon?” Five asked, but Helen pushed him forward into the tunnel, where Klaus caught him. “Klaus, what are you talking about? What’s an Archival Assistant? What are these doors?” Klaus staggered, as if he was about to collapse into the strange bus-seat corridor, but Helen just strided through it, as easily as Five might blink down for a cup of tea.

Helen answered instead. “The Apocalypse is coming, Five! And while that’s what my master-” she gestures to the five-sided circle they were walking on, or maybe the life-size sculpture of an elephant covered in small purple tentacles nearby- “wants, I don’t much fancy it. Your brother here, however, has been working for the past few years to stop it. Five turned to Klaus.

“You know about all this?” Five tried to wrap his head around what was happening.

“You scattered us in the past three years of London, Five. The Archives took me in, gave me a home and a job, and that’s when this” He gestured wildly, voice breaking “apocalypse stuff started.” Five looked close, and saw that Klaus had been crying. “Five, you know things. What have I gotten myself into? It’s too late to turn back now, but I at least want to know what kills me”

“Ready, boys!” Helen said, stopping by a door. When she opened it, there was a loud whooshing noise, and the three of them tumbled out into what looked like a cottage. 

Five got his bearings, then looked around. It was unassuming and tastefully decorated. A large-ish man of about thirty with curly brown hair sat in an armchair, reading a book. Helen calmly strode through, and Klaus was sprawled out on the floor from the tunnels.

The man looked up in alarm; “Helen? Klaus? What are you doing here? And who is-”

Helen cut him off, “We have to help Jon!”

“Will someone tell me who Jon is?” Five shouted. There were tons of other questions that came to mind- Were they in London? Who were Helen Jon, and the reading man, and how did Klaus know them? Why did Jon need help? And, most importantly- what were the strange, impossible corridors? 

“Jon’s my friend!” Klaus said desperately. He scrambled to his knees and ran to the reading man, who was no longer reading but staring confusedly at the two brothers. “Martin, follow us!” Klaus staggered along urging Martin and Five, both of whom looked equally confused, after him. 

Klaus threw open the door, and if it was possible for Five to get any more shocked, he did. The lights in the room were flickering, and in the center sat a man- or what once was a man. Green light surrounded him, pulsed in and out of him like a living being. The space around his head warped into what seemed to be hundreds of giant green eyes, watching as he read out in a panicked voice “ _You who watch and know and understand none. You who listen and hear and will not comprehend. You who wait and wait and drink in all that is not yours by right._

_Come to us in your wholeness!_

_Come to us in your perfection!_

_Bring all that is fear and all that is terror and all that is awful dread that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and and twists and leaves and hides and burns and hunt and rips and leads and dies!_

_Come to us._

_I. OPEN. THE DOOR.”_

The room exploded, and in the new light Five could see that all his siblings were there- Allison, Luther, Diego, Vanya, even Ben’s ghostly form had been summoned up by Klaus. And then- reality itself convulsed. Five barely had time to react as his flesh turned to stone, but stone that was porous and melty and alive, and the walls of the room wanted to drink him in, and a tape recorder that he hadn’t even noticed played static back until the static was all that remained of the place where Five’s thoughts once were, and the thoughts themselves were made of disjointed music that swelled to the volume of a dying soul. Only his eyes remained as they were to see the world recolor into the scent of mildew and fire, and of the taste of medical waste and death. Five couldn’t do anything as he felt something on his shoulder, either, and couldn’t even tell you if he had a shoulder, or if shoulders as a concept had even existed to begin with. 

His thoughts only came back into order some time later, and Five realised that he was sitting on the tentacle-covered elephant next to the distorted woman who called herself Helen. Somehow, the acid-trip physics of Helen’s tunnels made more sense than the world outside, and Five hated it. 

“What- what happened?” His voice was shaky. 

“The end of the world as we know it.” Helen turned to Five, and he saw that she was crying. Five had expected the tears to be distorted in some way- dancing with spirals like her eyes, or angular, or floating up into the multicolor-tinted air. But no, Helen’s tears were real, human, just like the ones that rolled out of Five’s own eyes. 

“But I just rescued them from it!”

“Vanya’s Apocalypse- the Rumor-weaver told me all about it.”

“Rumor-weaver?”

“You know her as Allison. But this Apocalypse is of a different nature, as I’m sure you’ve seen. The world you’ve brought yourself and your family into has always been travelled by the Powers That Be- the human fears, embodied. Every so often, they find Avatars to help them, like myself, or poor Jon. But you and your family are avatars of a different nature- ones of survival, the counterparts to my master and those like it. But, as much as it will pain my being to disobey their wishes, I don’t always have to side with the Entities.” Helen put a hand of Five’s shoulder, which stretched down to the middle of his back. Still, Five listened, “Five, you’re my last hope. If I can channel your power through the Spiral, I can distort time, and send us all back ten days, giving you time to save the world. Okay?”

Five straightened, resolute. “Anything to save my family.”

“Good.” Helen placed the other distorted hand onto Five’s shoulder, and he felt something shift inside of him, his power being refined into a point in space between the two of them, and opened into something between one of Helen’s doors and the portal Five had used, only a bit over a week ago, to return to 2019. This time, as Five stepped though, he felt the whole world shift with him.


	2. Tunnel Anomaly Log- American weirdo (Jon)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to don-tcallme-nymphadora on tumblr for being my amazing beta reader this trainwreck of a chapter. It's still a bit rough but if you guys saw the first draft *dying noises*

Pain. All Klaus knew was immense pain, through which the spirits shouted. 

_ Gertrude, she killed me! _

_ Ella, Ella, Ella. _

_ The eyes! He was all eyes, dark.  _ But gradually, the voices merged into calling one name;  _ Klaus! Klaus!  _ He rolled from side to side, sensing the stench of death and smelling rotting meat, but he didn’t care. Anything right now, a high, pain, death of his own and not just the secondhand, refined suffering of others channeled into his own head. Klaus heard someone scream. Maybe it was him, or someone else, or Ben. All Klaus knew was terror and pain.

***

Jon had been walking through the tunnels for maybe thirty-five minutes now, and the first torch was starting to flicker. Jon wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, but after his last escapade in the tunnels, anything other than a steady light in the winding stone structures made him relive those moments when the tunnels were closing in on him every time he closed his eyes. As he reached a crossroads Jon stopped, paranoid and weary. He shone the torch first to the right, then the left. Both directions looked the same, except for the fact that the left tunnel had not been cleared of worm carcasses. Jon shrugged to the damp and empty air, and turned left. 

Jon felt like something was off; the tunnels were full of various small currents, holes, and water dripping off stalactites, so there was ample background noise,but the water was louder in its sloshing, and the worm carcasses occasionally squelched or crackled in ways they wouldn’t do if Jon was alone. After what seemed like hours walking along the tunnel, trying to shake off panic, Jon became aware that it could only mean one thing; he was being followed. 

Jon did the reasonable thing; he turned around and brandished his heavy torch like a baseball bat. He expected anything from a bemused Martin to Jane Prentiss herself, but didn’t expect- a levitating body.

“Holy shit!!” He had read of such things in a past statement, the first one he recorded, but Jon never thought he would have to deal with anything of this nature. If this was his pursuer, where were the footsteps coming from? Somewhere else? He was about to give up on logic and run, but the floating body raised a hand. The motion was clumsy, as if the body wasn't moving its own hand but grabbing it by the wrist and yanking it rudely up, but Jon had seen enough to know to respect the strange entity’s personal space, so since the only way back to the Archives was through the floating body, Jon stood there. 

“What  _ are _ you?” Jon asked, barely keeping his voice from breaking.

The body whimpered a bit. It was a pitiful sound, barely audible, so unlike the steady position in which the body was floating, which drew Jon to a conclusion. 

“You’re… not just a floating body, are you? You’re something, or someone, holding up this...person.” 

In response, a puddle of water began to splash beneath the body, as if someone was stomping in it. 

“Is that a yes?” More stomping. Great, now he could communicate with an invisible body-levitator.

“All right, what do you want?” The body seemed to move towards Jon. 

“You want me to come with you?” Jon guessed. However cooperative this levitating thing seemed, Jon was not going to trust it, or follow it anywhere. But, for better or for worse, he was met with dead silence. “Okay, so you don’t want me to come with you. You want me to… give you something?” Silence again. “You want me to do something?” Splashing, as if Jon was getting warmer. “You want me to take…” Splashing as Jon looked around. “The body.” Splashing. 

Jon considered it for a moment, then said, “As nice as you seem, taking a body from an unknown entity is one of the least safe things to do in this scenario, so I think I’ll pass.” Silence. The body, and its unseen carrier, stood unmoving. 

“Well, you’re a stubborn one. Let’s see how you like  _ this.”  _ Jon picked up a bit of masonry from the ground and launched it towards the body. It jerked out of the way, but the masonry hit the body on the leg. It shuddred, the convulsed, then fell to the ground. 

“AAAAGH!” The voice was probably male, and scared. “Where am I? Who’s Ella!” The body stood up, and Jon got a better look at him. He was skinny, as if after years of substance abuse, but well-muscled and strong-looking. Jon wouldn’t take his chances against the man, except for the fact that he sounded terrified. He was dressed like the times Tim got a little to experimentative, with tight lace-up pants, a cargo vest, and bright tank top. Then, the man looked around wildly. 

“Ben!” He addressed an empty space with an American accent, voice breaking, and hugged seemingly no-one, although Jon noticed that he was lifted maybe half an inch off the ground. “Did we make it? Where are we? Oh no, where’s everyone else?” He listened for a moment. “No one? Are we the only ones who made it?” The man’s face took on a look of deep grief. “No, no, no, no, it’s some sort of a mistake.” He took a deep breath, and turned to Jon. 

Throughout all of this, Jon watched. It was clear now; he was dealing with someone who was hallucinating, and some force like Jane Prentiss had taken advantage of him. There was no time to be a hero, Jon knew, but the only way back to the Archives was through. 

“Excuse me?” Jon asked. The man turned to him. 

“Oh, it worked, didn’t it?” The strange man was half-crying, half-laughing in a peculiar way Jon had never seen before. “Now, who the fuck are you? Ben says you can get me out of here.”

“The… thing that was carrying you, its name is Ben?” Jon asked, then addressed “Ben” directly. “I mean, your name is Ben?’ More splashing, but this time Jon's strange new acquaintance winced.

“Aah, don’t call Ben  _ it. _ He’s my brother!” He said, clutching his head as if in pain. “And as for you-” he turned “-don’t sap my power without my permission. I can just translate it to the British guy here.”

“Wait, your brother?” 

“Yeah, my dead stepbrother, who I can see because I can talk to ghosts. And it’s taking all my energy right now to keep the spirits away. Any questions?” The man said, and passed out. 

Jon stood still for a few seconds, then walked over to the body and scooped it up in his arms, fumbling to keep his flashlight steady. He didn’t want to upset the thing this strange man had called Ben, and it was clear that Ben had enough power to cause the mad physical pain, possibly even break his mind and send him raving. 

“Now Ben, whatever you are, you’ve got your way.” 

If Jon had paid a bit more attention on the way back, he would have noticed the fact that the man’s body was a lot lighter then it should have been, but Jon just kept thinking about this bizarre turn to his tunnel exploration. 

***

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Martin asked. Jon, Martin, and Tim were clustered around the madman’s body, which was laid down on a spare desk. 

“Look, I found him in the tunnels. He was delirious, and passed out in my way, so what was I supposed to do?”

“Wait, you were in the tunnels?” Tim noticed. Tim was always too observant, Jon thought. 

“Well, that’s not the point right now. The point is, we have to find whatever crazy-hole he crawled out and send him on his way.” Jon had felt like he was being watched before, but now, he kept looking for Ben. He knew it was stupid; Ben was invisible, and any poltergeisting activity caused the madman pain, but Jon’s eyes were darting around the room. 

At that moment, he. “What year is it?” He asked. Jon noticed that he seemed a lot more scared than last time, which was probably an improvement. The man opened his eyes. “I’ve passed out again, haven’t I? My family!” He sat bolt up. “No, they’re not dead, I could feel it if they were, but Ben said they aren’t here either.” He exhaled choppily, The Archives staff shot each other nervous looks; he really was crazy. The man just seemed to notice his company. “Oh, hey!” He spoke with a false bravado. “I’m Klaus, by the way.” Jon and his assistants exchanged worried glances. 

Tim spoke up. “Hey... Klaus. I’m Tim. Do you want a glass of water?”

“Yeah. Sure!” Klaus nodded sporadically, in a way that was slightly off-putting. “Nothing spiked though; I’m two days clean.” Okay, Jon thought, so his assumptions about the guy being a junkie were pretty close. He must be dealing with withdrawal symptoms.

“Where are you from? You sound American.” Martin asked. 

“Well, Mom always told me that it was Germany, but I don't really know, do I? But my questions first; What year is it?” 

“Twenty-sixteen, why?” Sasha filled in. 

Jon turned to Tim, and whispered, “See? I couldn’t leave him.”

Klaus just continued on. “Where am I? Have you seen anyone else in the tunnels? There’s this one guy, really tall, a kid that looks thirteen and freaks everyone out-” Jon cut him off.

“ There has been no one in the tunnels as far as I know. You’re at the Magnus institute, a research center for the paranormal, and these are the Institute’s Archives. Here, we record statements about paranormal activity.”

“Paranormal activity, huh? That describes my entire life, up to this point. Literally the way I was born was paranormal, and as soon as I hit three it’s off to paranormal training with my six paranormal siblings. I was leading rescue missions against full armed criminals by the time I was eight, because paranormal. And running off at seventeen? Make that paranormal. Paranormal this, paranormal that, of course I had to land in a paranormal something-or-other.” 

“Um, sorry?” Jon had expected several reactions but Klaus, showing a definite pattern, had shoved them all in the wastebasket. 

“God, it feels good to get that out. You know, I’m the family fuck-up. Not only was I less… receptive to Dad’s training than my siblings, I’m no use in combat. I always got paired with Allison as "psychic manipulation”, but Allison was actually useful. She can make people do anything, just by telling them to. ” Klaus just rambled on. 

“Um, what did I miss?” Tim had returned with a glass of water. 

Jon shushed him, and said “Wait, Klaus, what do you mean by raids? Armed criminals?” 

“Long story. Why would you need to know, anyways?” At this point, Martin interrupted. 

“Well, it is a paranormal research facility, after all. We take the statements, and since we’re at work, Jon seems to think you’re a statement-giver.”

“If I give a statement, do I get any… compensation?” Klaus’s eyes lit up. 

“No, you don’t get paid.” Jon cut in. 

“I wasn’t talking about money. I mean, if I give a statement, could you give me advice? You're supposed to be an expert or whatever.” Jon wanted to say no, but there and then, Klaus looked so hopeful, and his story was so promising, that he nodded his head. Jon had his doubts about Klaus’s sanity, of course, but the worst that could happen was wasting fifteen minutes of his time and getting a complaint from Elias. 

“I’ll do what I can.” 

“Great!” Klaus downed the entire glass in two gulps, set it down, and shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “Where do I sign up?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Klaus and Jon centric? We love to see it


	3. Statement 0272907-Z [to view as supplemental- J] (Jon)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last Klaus-centric chapter for a bit, so savor it. Also getting that good ol' S2 Jon paranoia in there

“Statement of”

“Klaus.”

“Full name, please.”

“Number Four Hargreeves.”

“Full _legal_ name.”

“Yeah, that was it.”

“Okay. Statement of Number Four Hargreeves, regarding-” Jon paused, “His entire life up to this point. Statement given direct, 3rd September 2016. Recording by Jonothan Sims, head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.” 

“On October first, Nineteen eighty-nine, forty-three children were born to mothers with no previous signs of pregnancy. This made international headlines, of course. Eccentric billionaire, Olympic gold medalist, and world’s worst father Reginal Hargreeves made it his mission to adopt as many of these miracle children as possible.” Klaus leaned forward. “He got seven of us. Dad numbered us from least to most likely to rebel. I got Four, smack-dab in the middle. That was his first mistake- naming us too early, before our powers developed. 

It started when we were five, with Luther.”

“Full name, please.”

“Number One Hargreeves.” At this point, Jon was sure that Klaus was out of his mind, or 

playing a joke. It wasn’t professional, but he found himself asking;

“ Are all your step-siblings named after numbers?” 

Klaus just rolled his eyes, as if that was a question he heard every day, and leaned back 

into the statement-givers’ chair with the easy air of one who had all the time in the world. Jon always hated statement-givers like that; this may be their downtime, but Jon had a job to do, and he’d be damned if he gave Elias anything to bitch about.

“Well, so what if they are? Our sweet Pappy wasn’t the best at… anything really. So anyway, it started when we were five and Luther started just breaking everything.” Klaus sighed. “I mean, the dude couldn’t hold a fork without accidentally using it as a stress ball. Eventually, Reginald Hargreeves, absentee father figure had Luther strength tested, and turns out he had, like, a hundred horsepower. Is human strength measured in horsepower? I don’t care, to be honest.” Klaus emptied a glass of water, and set it down next to six already-empty glasses.The amount of water he drank was beginning to worry Jon. “And all throughout Luther’s little super-strength revelation, Dada bird was nowhere in our lives. The one exception was rigorous ‘schooling’- Greek and Latin classics way above everyone's reading level, calculus in fourth grade, and enough physical training to make even Luther tired as fuck. I got on pretty well with Diego and Ben-”

“I’d ask for names, but I’m assuming it’s more numbers.”

“Bingo!” Klaus clapped like an overenthusiastic helicopter parent, which caught Jon more than a bit off guard. “Numbers Two and Six. Now, where was I? Oh yeah, the worst years of my life.” Klaus’s face grew dark. “When I was six, I started… seeing things. A glimpse of a hand here, a reflection there. I could deal with it, until the screaming started. Life stories of the dead, and, what’s worse, death stories. Think, Jonothan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, what that does to a six-year-old’s mind. It drove me to the brink of madness several times over.

Diego used to have a stutter. Still did, last time I saw, when he got really nervous. Mom helped him sort it out, so my dumb six-year-old ass thought that Dad could help. Instead, he recognised my powers for what they were and started locking me in the morgue near our house. It was awful- the dead were stronger here, I was as close to their realm as I could get. But during those hours alone with the dead, something changed in me. I began to see them everywhere, and they seeped into my dreams. Best case scenario, that was. Because sometimes, I’d have these visions- My brother Five, alone in a barren wasteland, not a living soul around, or Ben, a much older Ben heading into a room, gunfire, and never coming out again.” Klaus had closed his eyes, and the animated quality of his voice had turned into barely a whisper. Jon could see that he should stop Klaus, whatever he was doing, but the American carried on. “When six of our powers developed, Dad took us out into the real world, to fight crime. At the tender age of thirteen, we were dismantling terrorist organizations and stopping armed criminals. How the American government allowed it, I have no idea. He called us the Umbrella Academy. We were crime-fighting celebrities of a sort, both the superhero and the actor who plays them, but that didn’t make the threat to our lives anytime we disarmed a bank robber any more real. And one day, I had that dream about Five at the end of the world, and I knew that it happened today. And that day at breakfast, he stormed out of the house, and we all searched for him, but I knew that Five would never return. I can feel people’s- souls- I guess you’d call them? Five wasn’t dead, but he was nowhere we could reach him, either. So I raided his room, and found a bunch of pain pills he took after blinking wrong, and I downed four just to feel something. And wouldn’t you know? It helped with the screaming I always heard. So there I was, Number Four Hargreeves, alias; Klaus, teenage junkie and alcoholic who saw ghosts and had prophetic dreams and put his life at risk every three days, because Dad was hell-bent on giving us a hero complex.

And then Ben died. I won’t get into how it happened, but it was my last straw. Ben is… was… the nice one. The brother that made you feel okay after coming to terms with the fact that you’re the family fuck-up. It was also the only time I’ve ever used my powers willingly, to summon Ben. Maybe it’s because we had a familial connection, or because I actually wanted Ben to be around, but he stuck around. He’s watching us now.” Klaus smiled and waved at a bit of space. “Hey Ben! Ugh, he’s been judging me the whole time. But yeah, after another four months, I ran out. Unlike the others, who all left later, I didn’t have a plan- after a few nights I found a pop-up shop with a suitably large basement. I did anything and everything to survive- from living on the streets to managing someone’s stall at a flea market, even used Dad’s insistence on teaching us all six languages to translate for some shady jobs. So, life was shit. Landed in rehab, enough boring stuff to last a lifetime.” Klaus’s ‘boring stuff’ sounded mostly terrible to Jon, but he was still processing everything else. It sounded fake, but Jon saw the hurt on Klaus’s face when he said it, and Ben didn’t come from nowhere. “Yeah. And, twelve days ago today, I got the news about Hargreeves Senior kicking the bucket. And I was like ‘oh shit, is he my responsibility now? I’ve never been good with dead guys.’” The joke fell flat. “But a few days later, guess who showed up at the funeral? Me, and the entire family. Except for Five, that is. He showed up later, out of a time rift portal thingy. All those years, forty-eight of them, he had been trapped, alone, in the Apocalypse, and due to some miscalculation or other, when he finally managed to jump again, he somehow got stuck in his thirteen-year-old body. “

“I’m sorry, jump?”

“Aah, yeah. Forgot to talk about that- Five’s thing is teleportation. Also time-travel, but not very well, as you can see from my position right now.” Klaus gestured around the room. 

“Actually, if it isn’t a problem, could you describe any… supernatural abilities your siblings have? It seems a bit confusing.”

“Well, I’d like to see you try to tell your entire life story to a Brit with a tape recorder and have it make sense. Okay though. Luther has super-strength. Diego can control the trajectory of any object, although he mostly uses it for throwing knives. I can see and summon ghosts. Five can teleport and time travel. Ben has an interdimensional portal inside his body.”

“What?”

“Tentacles.” Klaus took another sip of water. “Make sense?” Jon hated to admit it, but it did. “I can’t explain exactly what Vanya does, but it’s pretty powerful. That enough information for you?”

“It’ll do.”

“Good! So, a few days later, Five drops the news that an Apocalypse is happening. I was high out of my goddamn mind, but I got that the world was ending in like, four days at that point. And no one knew what to do. So I did what I do best- get high as fuck in the bathtub while Ben screamed at me for making his ghost ass look at my vey much alive ass.”

“Wait, Ben the dead brother?”

“Yes! I told you I summoned him.”

“In the bathtub, getting high?”

“Seventeen years ago. Didn’t I already say that? And where else would Ben go?” Klaus cocked his head, as if listening to someone.”

“I-”

“Shhhh.” Klaus reached across the desk and put a finger up to Jon’s lips. Overall, a very uncomfortable gesture for Jon, who caught a whiff of sweat mixed with about seven types of illegal smoke and… blood? “Ben’s yelling at me. But the gist is, he’s basically been my ghost bitch for seventeen years going strong. I got major-league high in the ancestral home, while some bitches in kids masks broke in and fought my siblings. Allison’s been doing her own stunts as a movie star, Luther’s super-strength boy, and Diego throws a mean knife, so they fought the masked weirdos off. One problem- they made off with yours truly as a hostage. If you ever felt underdressed, try being gagged in the back of a dainty little car with nothing but a towel around your waist. Of course, this is coming from the guy who ran through the town hall naked for twenty bucks, so take my words with a grain of salt.”

“ _Sorry?_ ” Tim was standing in the doorway of Jon’s office with another glass of water. 

“Oh, hey Tim!” Klaus said. “Thanks for the water.” 

Tim, looking as shocked about Klaus’s latest comment as Jon felt, set the eighth glass of water down on Jon’s desk. As he was walking back, he whispered to Jon, “You know what? I like this one.” Klaus seemed to have caught that, or maybe he was used to this sort of reaction, because he snickered a little bit. 

“But the real fun began at the torture. Ten straight hours of everything you can do to a poor soul in a smelly old motel room. Beatings, water shit, you name it. It was useless anyway- no one tells the junkie anything. But the worst thing they did? Take away the drugs. Because that’s when _they_ started coming back. The ghosts. If I tried to describe them, I wouldn’t do them justice. They’re horrible, just…”

“Klaus?” Jon asked. The statement-giver looked up and Jon saw that he had been crying. “If there’s something you want to keep private, it is perfectly within your right to do so.”

“No, no. The last person I told was Five, when I was twelve. And he’s fifty-something now, so he wouldn't help even if he could. But the ghosts are… scary. No other way to describe it. Gaunt faces, trying to reach me through the veil between worlds. And the worst part is, I know that they could. And they keep shouting my name, trying to pull me in with them. And that’s what happens when I’m sober.” Klaus paused for a minute, and took a sip of the now half-empty glass of water. “But I haven’t been that sober since I was thirteen, so I had no idea what came next. And what came next was, I started seeing my kidnappers’ victims. Hazel and Cha-cha were the names those two bastards went by. All code, of course, for a place they called the Commision. I think Five worked there at one point. The victims talked to me, and I told their stories to Hazel and Cha-cha. I think it fucked them up a little bit, to be honest. Eventually, some police ex-girlfriend of Diego’s came after me, got shot, Diego came after me, kidnappers got away, and I crawled out through the vents. I took a suitcase on the way, hoping it would be full of money. Instead, I opened it, and then next thing I knew? I was in Austin, Texas, 1969.” At this point, Klaus’s face took on a morose, faraway look. “I fought in the Vietnam War. As true as I’m sitting here. As for what else happened the year I was in the past, I won’t say.” Jon didn’t have the keenest eyes, but he noticed Klaus’s hands drift toward something around his neck. “But eventually, I came back to the present, and destroyed the time travel briefcase. 

After that, the end of the world came quick. There were no armies, no terrible gunfire, just one day- the end. ”

“That’s it?”

“No, that’s not it. It’s just everything I could let myself say right now. If I tried to say anything else I’m not ready to. I think I’d lose it here and now. But at the end of it all, Five time-travelled us all into a random year and place in the past. And I landed in the tunnels.”

“One more thing. Everything you say, it sounds extremely unlikely, and as much as I would like to believe your explanation, we have shelves upon shelves of drunks’ and junkies; statements that sound just like youre. Do you have any proof of the things that happened to you?” To be fair, the only reason Jon believed anything from Klaus’s strange statement was the tunnel incident. 

“Do you have a camera?”

“Uh… only a phone camera.”

“That’ll do. Get it out.” Jon got it out, and pointed the camera at Klaus.”

“Okay, now what?”

“Now, it’s showtime.” Klaus leaned back, and closed his eyes. At first, Jon thought that nothing was happening, but the air in the room seemed to get a bit darker and colder, and Klaus’s hands began to glow blue. Slowly, a form began to take shape between them, sitting cross-legged on Jon’s desk. It was translucent, glowing blue, and as it solidified Jon could make out the features. They showed an Asian man about his own age- twenty nine?- dressed in blue jeans, a plain black t-shirt, and a leather jacket, with a small and slightly sad smile.

“So, Jon!” He also spoke with an American accent. He leaned in conspiratorially, and said, “You’ll have to excuse my brother. Klaus gives terrible warnings. And if you want evidence-” Ben gestured at Jon’s phone, which he had dropped in shock. 

“Ghost.” Jon finally choked out. 

“Yep!” Klaus called from behind Ben’s spectral image. Jon buried his face in his hands. Oh, he had known of the paranormal, you didn’t work at the Magnus Institute without it, but the last few hours had been strange even for him. Finding Klaus apparently floating in the tunnels, hearing his bizarre life account, and now the ghost. Jon had to pace his breath, and finally looked up. “Hurry up, you two! It’s not easy for me!”

“Okay, okay.” Jon gathered himself. “So, you’re Ben?”

“Yeah. And you’re Jonothan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.” Ben grinned.

“I have to make it official. But, Jon.”

“Sorry, sorry!”

“Was everything Klaus said true?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” Jon took another moment.”I’m sorry, this is all very-”

“Strange?” Ben asked.

“Annoying as fuck!” Klaus called. “Ben, what did you want to tell the guy?”

“Nothing now, don’t worry.” Ben turned to Klaus. “But you’ll be getting an earful from me. What made you think that dumping your life story on some underpaid Londoner would make things any better?”

“Because if I have their trust, they’ll tell me if someone sees our family!”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, Jon. Of course I also wanted to help the Institute, or whatever, but you can’t blame me!”

“I guess I really can’t.” Jon admitted. “And if anyone gives a description of a murderous middle schooler, I’ll hit you up.” All three of them laughed a little at that. 

Ben turned back to Klaus. “Well, I think I’m done here.”

“Finally!” Klaus sighed with relief, and his hands began to shake. The blue light dissipated, and, when it was gone, so was Ben. 

“Is he, you know, still here?”

“Yeah.” Klaus stood up. “Now, I’ll be going.”

“Where?”

“You know, wherever. Try to find my family. Worst case scenario, I’ll just be on the streets again. Been there, done that.”

***

“You seriously want to let him stay in the Archives?” Martin asked. “I mean, it’s good and all, but this is so out of the blue.”

“I heard his statement, and have decided that he needs some temporary housing.”

“Yeah, he’s a homeless junkie who gave a statement. If we gave every homeless junkie who gives a statement temporary housing, we’d be a homeless shelter!” Sasha protested. “Besides, that guy gives me the creeps.”

“Why do you care so much?” Martin retorted.

I was siding with you!”

“How is that siding with me?”

“Guys, guys!” Tim cut in. Jon was thankful for it; he had wanted to, but Martin and Sasha had both taken a strange interest in him recently, and he wasn’t about to attract any attention to himself. “Can we calm down? I have no idea why Jon did this either. Jon, care to enlighten us?”

“According to his statement, he may be in some serious danger.”

“Yeah, we’ve had that before, but what makes this Klaus guy special?” Sasha pressed on.

“He gave me proof of it. Also, there’s a possibility that he has a lost little cousin, and this area is the last place they saw each other.” Jon was lying about the lost little cousin part, but it sounded good enough to cover the Five guy in case Klaus did find his family. 

“I still think it’s borderline crazy of you, but I won’t file a complaint.” Martin conceded. Everyone agreed with Martin, of course, and gradually the argument dissipated. Good. Jon couldn’t let his real reason for keeping Klaus in the Archives slip; if he could summon ghosts, could Klaus eventually summon the ghost of Gertrude?


	4. I <3 LONDON (Five)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> p a i n 
> 
> and thanks again to @/don-tcallme-nymphadora (tumblr) for making this mess mildly palatable :)

For the second time in as many minutes, Five stumbled into the tunnels. Once again, they were damp and dreary, with the same distant dripping of a stalagmite and worm corpses on the ground. Any moment now, Five was expecting to see a femur, or maybe Helen and Klaus come through the doorway again, though he knew he had more time. The problem with time travel, especially in Five’s situation, was trying not to panic or get overwhelmed by deja vu. 

This time, his family was safe, but the Apocalypse was still coming. A different sort -- one Five had even less chance of stop[ing. He had to find his family and stop the new Apocalypse, and if he could trust Helen, and Five didn’t know if he could, he only had ten days left before their doom.

So, Five did what he did best. He picked a direction and ran through the tunnels, until he got to a doorway; a small wooden thing with peeling grey paint. He paused -- the last doorway out of the tunnels led to Helen’s corridor dimension -- but blinked to the other side anyways. There was no time to lose on being overly careful.

The other side turned out to be a city alleyway. Five assumed it was London judging from the towering architecture and the discarded plastic bag on the side of the street, emblazoned with “I <3 LONDON”.

Now, he had to find a lead. All he had were the names Jon, Martin, and Helen, as well as the knowledge that Klaus was in a place called the Archives. He set out in search of a place that could give him information. Someplace that knew about London. It didn’t take Five long to find a run-down little shop called “The Union Jack” that seemed to specialize in British souvenirs. Five figured that they must get a lot of confused tourists, and Five’s London accent still wasn’t so good, so he decided it was a safe bet to ask for vague directions. 

The doors to the souvenir shop opened with the ring of a bell, and Five walked in, eyeing the touristy Queen’s portrait magnets and shirts printed with Union Jacks. Sighing, Five walked up to the counter.

“Hey, kid!” A perky assistant greeted him. Five was pleased to see that she didn’t have the plastered-on American grin, but she still looked a little too lively for Five’s taste. “Are you looking for your parents?”

“No, I’m not. I’m actually-”

“Looking to spend your pocket money, then?”

“Looking for the Archives.” Immediately, the cashier's customer service smile faded, as if she were preparing herself for an unpleasant chore.

“The Archives?”

“Yeah, there’s a guy named Martin there, I think?”

“I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of any Martin working at an archive. Maybe you’re looking for the public library, or some sort of research building?”

“No, my, um, brother said he was working at the Archives.” Another weird look, and Five was left scrambling for an alibi. “Our parents are divorced, see, and our Dad lives here. Mom let me visit on my own, but we thought that the other person did the planning stuff out.” Five could tell that the cashier didn’t buy it, but she didn’t question Five any further, which was a relief. Five wasn't used to having to act like a thirteen-year-old, and so far it was infuriating.

“Are you sure no one mentioned an institute or library? Any of those will have an Archive.”

“Sorry, my brother and I haven’t always seen eye to eye.” Five groaned internally at the badly done half-truth. So he was the Commission’s best assassin for years, wormed his way out of sticky situations that would make this cashier’s jaw drop, but the second Five had to pretend he was actually thirteen he was terrible at it? No fair. To save face, Five tried his best at a thirteen-year-old smile, but that just seemed to unsettle the cashier. 

“All right then. Well, the best I can say is try finding a Google Map of anywhere there’s an archive, and try calling it. Meanwhile, do you think you’d want to change out of that? We have stuff that’s a lot more fun.” The cashier gestured at Five’s uniform, and then at a rack of blue shirts with British maps on them.

“Say that again, and you’ll regret it.” 

Ignoring the shocked look from the cashier, Five turned on his heels and left the souvenir store, hearing the bell ding after him. 

Of course, Five had been an idiot to think that “the Archives” that took Klaus in would be clearly labelled and well known enough for some twenty-year-old girl in a trashy souvenir store to point him to it. With a sigh, he began to search for a public library.

Lucky for Five, London was big and tightly packed with various places of knowledge, so after only a few minutes of running down the streets, he found a building advertising itself as a library, and made a beeline straight to the computers. They were glitchy, and the digital maps didn’t show much, but eventually Five had a list of libraries and universities with public archives that spanned two pages. Looking at it, Five resisted the urge to put his fist through the computer -- he didn’t have much time to save his family, and locating Klaus would still leave the rest of his family. 

The others had all been in the room where the Jon guy had ended the world, and Five would much rather have Diego or Allison on his side than Klaus or his new friend, Martin. And killing Jon was bound to be a problem -- the guy had some serious power. 

Two hours after his conversation with the cashier, Five stood on the busy London sidewalk, map and piece of notebook paper -- some lady had been keen to “lend the studious young chap” -- in hand, ready to search every establishment in town. The first was right across the street -- the Lacey E. Lukas library. He plunged into traffic and ran across the street, ignoring the car horns beeping at him -- Londoners were definitely less polite than Five remembered. 

He stopped at the library door. The door was opaque, and the building had few windows, so Five tried the door handle. It went easily, and he stepped inside the library. 

The door opened with a creak, and Five was surprised by how empty the place was. There was no dust anywhere, but the place was completely empty and completely silent.

“Hello?” Five called out. No answer. He walked up to the book return desk, and saw that it was empty. He tried a nearby room, nothing. The computers were empty, just plain black shiny screens. Five’s heart began pounding, and he ran from room to room trying to find anyone else. Finally, he ran into something that looked like a meeting room, but every desk had a blank nameplate, except for one labelled “MR. FIVE”. 

Five’s breath left his body, and blinked out of the library or at least, he tried to. The familiar sensation was there, but when he opened his eyes he was in the front room of the library. Five threw himself at the door, but it was locked from the outside with no way to pick it. His ears started ringing, and in a panic Five grabbed a random book off the display shelf and opened it to a random page. 

Five had been through two Apocalypses today, and had seen his entire family dead for the second time. He thought his day couldn’t get any worse, but as Five stared at his own word, from his own notebook, sprawled across the pages of a book he had never read like inked spiders, Five began to doubt his own sanity. 

_ Well, I guess I’m fifteen now. I have to keep trying to get back home. _

No. No, it couldn’t be. Five sank down, his head started pounding. After the past week, he was full of uncertainty and fear, but those emotions bubbled up inside of him now and threatened to overflow. A deserted library, two Apocalypses, his old Commission name plate, his journal. All of these thoughts spiraled into a dull, throbbing, ache that seemed to tear Five apart from the core, and burning cars and rubble began to swim in front of Five’s eyes again. 

Five didn’t know how long he spent curled up on the ground, but eventually he began to think straight again. Shakily, he pulled himself up by a book return cart, and selected something else from the cart -- a thin, green book that couldn’t conceivably be a notebook. Hetook a deep breath and opened it, already knowing what it would be. Sure enough, it was something he had made. This time, it was a sketch of Dolores.

Five pulled every book out of the book return cart, and each and every one was covered in his own scrawl from the Apocalypse. He didn’t know how long it had been, but it didn’t matter. He was alone, all alone in the strange library, nothing but constant reminders of his own solitude around him.

Eventually, Five had explored every room in the library, and hadn’t even found a window. Every book in it was a notebook, and so Five was forced to make a choice -- either relive his time in the Apocalypse, or face the emptiness and silence. He chose the silence, of course, because anything was better than staring at his twenty-year-old hopeful words and facing his failure. 

Time had no meaning to Five anymore. Hours, days, months, seconds - it meant nothing in isolation. The only rhythm to keep up with was Five’s heartbeat and breathing. It was torture, but in the back of Five’s mind, something spoke up.

“ _ There, isn’t this better? You’ve been better than them, and you’ve always known it. It’s why you ran away in the first place. And here, you’re finally getting solitude.”  _

Five told his brain to shut up -- it wasn't him, had never  _ been _ him. The coldness was just an act Five put on to save face. Someone in the family had to be the responsible one. Under it all, Five had always cared, it was behind everything he did. 

But the little voice in his head grew louder as time passed, until at times he was convinced that he  _ was  _ better than his siblings. Five remembered the past few days, everyone’s faces looking at him with concern. And so he sat in a corner, wrestling with his own mind. It might have been seconds, minutes, months, or centuries, but it didn’t matter now. The voice grew overpowering. Maybe Five,  _ was _ better off this way. 

No, he wasn't. 

But he was, really. 

On and on, Five argued with himself in the solitude. 

“ _ Five? _ Five! Is it you? Are you alive? You’re alive!” 

Five was being shaken by the shoulders. He looked up into an unfamiliar face. A young black woman with an American accent and long hair that went from her natural dark brown to blonde to icy white. She was dressed in a faded yellow “London Antique Society 1997 convention” shirt a few sizes too big, a leather jacket, and black sweatpants. On her wrist was a tattoo of an umbrella.

He looked up. “I believe my name is Number Five. At least, it was. Who are you?”

“You don’t remember me? Fivey, it’s me, Allison! It’s your sister!” The shaking was getting more and more frantic, and the woman’s voice broke off into something between a laugh and a sob. Now that Five thought of it, he had memories of herut Five felt detached from it all, as if he was an observer watching this sister and so many others scuttle about like ants.

“I remember an Allison. You called yourself my sister, once, I remember that.”

“Five?” Allison let go, reluctantly. “Please listen to me. You’re in the Lonely.”

“Yes, I’ve always been lonely.”

“No, you don’t understand!”

“I have done things your mind couldn’t even comprehend. I thought I was doing it for you, too.” Five turned to Allison. “But I wasn’t. I was trying to save the world, and when I saw fit,” Five mimed moving a chess piece, “we were allies for a cause.”

“Listen to me!” 

“You’re frantic and scared. As you should be, you should be scared of me, Number Three.” 

Number Three tried to say something, but she was shocked into silence. Distantly, Five noticed her breathing getting heavier, panic, concern, and hurt mixing themselves on her face. Maybe now she would go away and leave. Five just wanted to go back to… whatever he had been doing. Five couldn’t remember, but time and memory were hazy.

“I’m not scared of you though.” She managed finally.

“You are amusing.”

“And you’re my brother.” 

“That means nothing. ”

Allison drew herself together, and held up a book. It wasn’t another of Five’s journals, but a heavy tome inscribed with the words  _ The Self. _

“So you’re finally reading? Broadening your mind?”

“Five, this is a Letiner. 

“A lightener? You don’t need that -- just look at your hair. Or, better yet, leave.”

“A Leitner.” Allison said. “And I heard a rumor-”

“ _ What? _ ”

Number Three straightened up, resolute. “When we needed you, you never left us, Five. And now you’re here, so I heard a rumor that you knew what  _ The Self _ had done to you.” 

Five had been the subject of Number Three’s rumors before, and he knew how they felt. Still, Five was prepared for being forced to do some menial task, not the current of knowledge that flooded his mind. 

Suddenly, Five saw the book for what it was -- a dangerous item. The library had been founded around it, but it had never been a library, not really -- just a trap for people like him. The book trapped you inside the library with nothing but your own worst regrets and deepest fears, and made the mind withdrawn and isolated. Five knew as well that something big, something powerful, something like Helen’s master was behind the book, and he wasn’t very keen to meet it. Five had a feeling that the book’s power source would have a lot more hold on him than Helen’s tunnels. 

“Allison? Is it really you?”

“Let’s get out of here, Fivey.”

“How long have you been here?” Five asked. Allison, wielding the book, opened the door to the library, and Five winced at the light hit his eyes. 

“Hm, let’s see…. two years?”

“Two years?” Five asked, shocked.

“Yeah. I thought you were dead! You can’t believe how much I missed you.”

“For me, it’s the same day we left 2019.”

“All that in a day?” Allison looked surprised. 

“If only you knew. But when you rumored me into seeing the book, there was something behind it. I mean, the Commission had their briefcases, and I’ve seen books here create tunnels, but behind it, there was something… bigger.”

“Well, this part of Britain has strange forces at work here, these-”

“Powers that Be?” Five asked, remembering Helen’s words.

“How did you know that? I thought you were only here for a day.”

“I’ve met some interesting people.” Five said. 

Allison smiled to herself and shook her head. “That’s our Five, right there. Not one day, 

And you’re already knee-deep in murder attempts and strange forces.”

“It’s what I do best.” Five straightened his tie, and reciprocated Allison’s grin. Gradually, as the last remnants of  _ The Self  _ left Five’s mind, he and Allison walked and talked about menial things. After the book’s influence, Five was glad to see another face. Eventually, they reached a small store. 

“Saleasa Antiques?”

“Yep! Work sweet work, and my shift begins really soon. The important thing is, Mike will be here, and you’ll probably want a cup of tea.

“Coffee would be good, actually.”

“He’ll probably have some of that stowed away. Two years, you know, picked up a bit of a tea habit.” 

“Why are you taking me to your work at an antique place, anyway? And why do you want me to meet Mike?” Five asked. Allison didn’t hear him though, because she was already in the store. Five sighed and followed, but when he saw Allison disappear in the back, Five stayed behind. Eventually, she came back talking to someone, presumably Mike himself. He was about Five’s age -- Five’s  _ real  _ age of fifty-four - and talked in a heavy accent.

“So you have the Letiner?”

“Yeah. And Mike, remember what I told you about my past?”

“The Umbrellas, yes.”

“Well, I want you to meet my brother, Number Five.” 


	5. Reprise (Diego)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I promise this is the last exposition chapter! And thanks again to my beta reader, you're fucking amazing.

Diego had been stumbling around what seemed to be modern-day London for hours now. He’d landed in a tunnel network, all alone, no trace of his family. 

Oh well. He could grieve later. 

What he needed to do was sit down and think things through, maybe get directions so Diego went into the first cafe he found. It was like stepping into a department store in October- the whole place was covered in ghost and skeleton motifs, despite it being nowhere near Halloween. Diego looked up at the shop logo- ‘Spook Stories Themed Cafe’. Well, Diego had had more than enough spook stories for a lifetime, but he still took a seat. 

“Excuse me? You order at the counter over there, and the tables are only for paying customers.” Diego looked up at a perky-looking waitress wearing an apron.

“You take American money?”

“Unfortunately, we do not. You a tourist?”

Diego let out a rough chuckle. “More like a refugee.”

“Ah. And by the way, we don’t allow, um, weapons in this establishment.” She smiled apologetically, as if to say  _ I mean, come on.  _

“Listen here, lady. I’m very tired, and I happen to have all these knives and not much patience, so you’re going to make an exception. Now, I’ve waited tables myself, and I know that you do not get paid enough for this, so take these to the currency exchange.” Diego slipped the now-pale waitress a few twenty dollar bills. “Understood?”

She nodded. “Understood,” and walked away. Diego buried his face in his hands, and tried to zone out the radio. It didn't work. 

An overenthusiastic voice called out through the speakers,  _ “Now, coming up, exclusive interview with Elias Bouchard, Jacob Henrys, and more about their position as heads of various research institutes. More at eight o’clock sharp, tomorrow! But now, it’s time to talk about the viral Twitter wars involving washed-up paranormal YouTuber, Melanie King.”  _

Diego drummed his fingers on the table. As usual, the world was loud and busy. He wanted to tune it out, tune out London and the perky waitress and the voice of the radio host and the distant sounds of traffic and the chattering of people in the cafe. Right now, all Diego wanted was a place to think through the Apocalypse, and Vanya, and the fact that his family might be dead. Probably were dead. But if he thought about that in this quaint little themed cafe, he would lose the last of his shit, and the last thing Diego needed was to be arrested.

Eventually, Diego had to get out of that place, to process what had happened. Only a few hours before, he had been fighting to save the world, side by side with his family. Now, he had lost everything and everyone, been dumped in London, and, on top of it all, if he was actually in 2017 Diego only had a few years left to live, and was spending tonight curled up under a bridge somewhere. He remembered some of Klaus’ anecdotes about being on the streets, and if anyone gave him any trouble- the only good thing Dad ever did for them was teach them how to hold their own in a fight. 

The last thoughts coursing through Diego’s head as he lay down were about how no one could see him cry. And that was fine by him.

***

“What do you  _ mean,  _ I don’t exist on any official record?” Diego fumed. 

“Sir, this card doesn’t exist, as far as I know. There are zero documented cases of a Two Hargreeves, anywhere. Now, there is a Tina Hargreaves in Toronto, Canada, but that definitely isn’t you.” The bank worker shrugged. “You know there was another weird-looking guy named Hargreeves who came here." The bank worker looked up. "Is your real name Number Two?"

Thirty minutes later, Diego stormed out of the building and headed into a random alleyway for something to do. He had to make some sort of plan- if he was trapped in what he had found out was 2016 London, he had to make a plan. Get a job, a place to live, and then the hard part; find a way to forge his passport and create a fake identity to avoid getting deported. It was a fairly big leap, but some of Diego’s closest friends over the years had had their lives stripped from them because of a misspelled fake ID. 

Or, there was always Option Two- reprise his role as the Kraken, no emotional attachments involved this time. Diego slid down the dumpster he was sitting on, and headed out into the London night. 

***

“Possible Section 31” Diego’s police radio blared. That was bound to be interesting- Section 31 always involved something unusual. Normally just some easily-explained anomaly, but once or twice Diego had seen things that challenged his time at the Umbrella Academy. He listened out to the full coordinates, slipped in his car, and started racing toward that point.

He saw it almost fifteen minutes later- a van, unmarked except for the words “Breekon and Hope” on its side. Without thinking, Diego parked his car some hundred feet away, and ran up to the back of the van. The report had described an abandoned van on the roadside that opened up into a much longer interior than expected, meters on meters of unlit van interior. At one point, the caller had said that it stretched out both sides. Then, the operator had described a crackle of static, and the caller’s phone had disconnected. The operator had also said to send the ones that were “sectioned” some time ago. 

With a creak, Diego opened the door to the van. For a moment, he thought of a much different van, a plumbing van the doors of which he had opened only seven months ago with Luther, trying to save Five, and, by extension, save the world. Now, Diego crouched in the van alone, and pulled out a knife. That much hadn’t changed. 

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” A voice said behind him. Diego jumped a little, and turned around to see… a policewoman. Well, that’s the best he could describe her. She had close-cropped blonde hair, a scar across the bridge of her nose, and was probably the most menacing person Diego had ever seen. Yet there was a driven energy to her- as if she cared as much as Diego about what she did.

“None of your business.”

“You know, I think the uniform makes it my business.”

“If you must know, I was going to investigate this endless van over here, because half the time the operator on your shitty radio says the words ‘Section thirty-one’, no one shows up.”

“So you think it’s  _ your  _ business to act as amateur justice enforcement to what is technically a crime scene? What type of American slum did you crawl out of?”

“I have the right to remain silent.”

“Yeah, definitely an American. Now, get the fuck back.”

“Look, police lady-”

“Daisy.”

“Look, crazy Daisy, you may be police, but I think I know more than you about the supernatural, and that’s definitely what an endless van-tunnel capable of swallowing up civilians falls under, or my name isn’t Diego.”

“You know what I think? You’ve got a serious hero complex. And you need a haircut.”

“I’ve been told both of those things.”

“You’re also trespassing on a crime scene. Don’t you know that as soon as you touch something, we can’t use it as evidence?”

“I’ve also been told that.” Don’t think about her. Not now. Not Eudora. Daisy seemed to notice his moment of hesitation, though.

“Yeah, well, you clearly haven’t learned. Now get the fuck out of here.” Diego didn’t move. Neither did Daisy. They stood that way for a few seconds.

“AAAAAGH!” From the depths of the van, someone screamed. Immediately, Daisy pushed past Diego, who fell to the ground and hit the wall. For a moment, his head pounded and he blacked out, but not wasting any time, he got back up and headed into the tunnel. Both Diego and Daisy, who was taller than him, had to crouch there, but they headed into the darkness for ten, twenty, thirty feet, definitely longer than any vehicle ever created. As they ran, Diego noticed that the walls seemed to be getting bigger, until both of them were running in a full-size corridor, and the van entrance was out of sight. 

Eventually, Daisy stopped, and Diego skidded to a halt behind her. 

“What’s the plan, crazy Daisy?”

“Aah! You’re here.” Daisy had just noticed Diego. “And do  _ not  _ call me that. Right now, the plan is for you to turn back, preferably all the way to America.”

“Hey! That’s cultural erasure- I could be Canadian.”

“But you’re not.”

“I’m not.” Diego conceded. “By the way, you’re keeping remarkably calm in a place like this.”

“So are you.”

“I’ve seen some shit.”

“So have I.” The two of them stood in the van-corridor for a few seconds. “Now stand back and disable whatever you used to pick up police radio, I’m going to try and contact the caller.” Diego hadn’t brought the secondhand police radio along, so he just stood back as Daisy

Started fiddling with something. Eventually, she seemed to give up, and groaned in frustration. 

“I swear, if it’s something to do with you…” She threatened. 

“Nope. I’m so over my signal-clogging days.”

“What?”

“That was what we in the amateur world call a joke.”

“I could arrest you at any time, you know.”

“You couldn’t. Here, let me try something.” Diego pulled out a knife.

“No! What the hell are you doing with a knife?” Daisy started to grab it out of his hands, but Diego jerked back. 

“You know, I could ask you the same thing.” Both of them looked up from their argument. The voice they heard was distorted- no other way to describe it. But the shape from which it came- well, it emitted light like a dentist’s X-ray scanner, and gave Diego a migraine just by looking at it. The shape was dressed in what would be business casual, if business casual was made solely out of impossible shapes and shifting spirals. The figure itself seemed to shift, but two things stayed the same- its shampoo-commercial blonde hair and overlarge hands with long fingers. 

Daisy visibly stiffened. “You.”

“Woah, woah, woah.” Diego turned to Daisy. “You’ve met this guy? Do the two of you have some sort of crazy blonde thing going on?” Daisy and the shifting man both stared him down. If looks could kill, Diego would so be dead by now.

“Now, now, Number Two.” Diego dropped a knife out of shock- this strange figure knew his number, and no one had called Diego Number Two since Dad had died. “I think everyone here should calm down, go home, maybe get a nice cup of tea. After all, you're never going to see poor Dana again. That 999 call was her very last, I’m afraid.”

Everything happened so fast, it was like a waking dream. Daisy pulled out a gun, aimed it, and tried to shoot the figure. Tried, because the bullet ricocheted off the figure and headed straight towards Daisy. Diego shot out his hand. He never said it, but he always loved using his power. It was like he could picture and recreate every inch of the van-corridor in his head. Diego was hyper aware of every atom of himself, Daisy, the bullet- Michael was strange and shifting, but it barely took any effort to tune him out. Diego knew what he had to do to change anything’s trajectory, and he barely, just barely twitched a finger. The bullet responded like it and Diego had been in sync all his life, and it shot away from Daisy into the depth of the tunnels. The second it did so, the figure faded away as if someone had tuned out static. During the split second it took, Diego felt like himself again.

Daisy stared at him in shock. “How did you do that?”

“Excuse me?” They heard a frantic voice. 

“London police,-”

“And amateurs!”

“London police, is this Dana Matherson?”

“Yes! Oh, I’ve been here for ages. I think my leg is broken.” There was a clamor a few feet away, and when Diego and Daisy got close enough to see, it was certainly an interesting sight. A significantly overweight woman in her mid-twenties wearing a light pink sundress, despite the autumn weather, passed out on the ground. 

“I think she’s out cold.”

“Thank you for pointing that out,  _ Number Two. _ ”

“Do you even know what that means?”

“No, but it makes you uncomfortable, and that’s enough for me. Now, make yourself useful and help me drag this woman out of the van. 

The trip back seemed to take a much shorter time than the trip there- the very tunnel seemed to be shrinking behind Daisy and Diego as they dragged Dana's unconscious body out of the van. The moment they finally heaved Dana over and onto the ground, the van’s doors shut with a clang that reminded Diego of a cast iron gate more than anything. 

“Okay, the official story is, Dana here hit her head and was delirious. You saw nothing.” Daisy said, straightening up. 

“Really? I thought that police were supposed to be upholders of truth and justice.”

“We keep the peace, and I’d consider us damn good at it, but I’m not telling management that my life was saved by an amateur with bullet-controlling abilities. By the way, what was that back there?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Are you blind? Did you even notice blondie over there in the van tunnel?”

“Yeah, I did, and I can assure you my life story gets way stranger than that.”

“I’m not trying to figure out your life story. I’m trying to figure out how you redirected that bullet, so you’re never a threat.”

“You think I have malicious intentions toward the London police? If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

“Good for you.”

“I’m glad we’re on the same page, because the last policewoman I trusted? Ended up dead, blood all over the carpet.”

“I’m tougher than her.”

“Geesh, have some respect for a guy’s grief!” Diego threw up his hands. 

“Oh- sorry.” For a second, Daisy’s face almost lost some of its tautness. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“The bullet thing? I’ve been able to do that since I was a kid- my step brother Five always used the words, ‘Control the trajectory of airborne objects’, but all that meant for me was that I was good with a throwing knife. So, I was seventeen, and ran away from home to enroll in the police academy. They threw me out for being too hotheaded.”

Daisy chuckled. “Can’t imagine why. Whoever did that sounds just like my old coworkers, when I was new on the force.”

“Well, my childhood was a bit unusual, and let’s just say it left me with a strong sense of justice, so I decided to take things into my own hands.”

“That would be amateur crime-fighting.”

“Yeah. I got a day job and a place, and for a while I had my life figured out. Then, seven months ago, I lost all my siblings and my best friend in an… accident, and decided I needed a new start. No connections, no documents, no risk.”

“There’s a lot of risk involved with running around, answering police calls without a badge.”

“Well, I mostly take the ones you guys can’t for legal reasons. The amount of times I’ve seen one of your lot say ‘I wish I could help, but’ drives me insane. If there’s anything the police academy taught me, is that you guys are limited.”

“You’re aware that you just confessed to, like, a ton of crimes. Right?”

“Yeah, I know. You’ve said it yourself once, sometimes you wish you could help people, but there’s just not enough evidence. Me? I have all the evidence I need right here.” Diego tapped his temples.

“You know what? I like your dedication.” Daisy smirked, “And the fact that you can control bullets helps your image a bit.”

At this point, Dana Matherson began to stir. Daisy sighed, mentally preparing herself for the task of calming Dana down when she woke up.

“Alright, Diego, this is where you go. It’s been…” she looked him over “...nice meeting you, but if Dana over here wakes up she won’t hesitate to report both of us to my boss.”

“Well, if no one’s in the van, my work here is done. Peace out, crazy Daisy.” Diego started to walk away, after a few steps he turned to wave Daisy goodbye. Her gaze flicked up at his wave, but she just rolled her eyes. Diego sprinted off to his own van; he wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.


	6. Back Room Tea (Five)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not an introduction chapter this time! Also Five does threaten knife violence so tw for that

Five and Mikaele stood face to face in the antique store as Allison watched on. Five studied Mikaele, trying to see if they had met before- Middle aged, Asian, close-cropped hair, tall, built like a heavyweight lifter. If worst came to worst Five could beat him in a physical fight, but it wouldn’t be enjoyable. And all the while, Mike was studying him in the exact same way. Finally, Mike broke the silence. 

“Well Five, I’ll be Mikaele Salesa.”

“Well, Mikaele Salesa, I’ll be Number Five.” This caused Mikaele to laugh. 

“It’s been a long time in my business that I talked to someone my age. Most of us don’t make it this long, you know.”  _ Someone my age?  _ How could he know that? Five looked over to Allison, who mouthed something along the lines of  _ I told him everything.  _

“Our business?”

“Keeping foolish people from destroying the world, of course! I understand that Allison didn’t tell you my story, so I take this as my time to formally invite you to a cup of tea.” Five’s head was spinning now. 

“I’m sorry, what exactly do you two do? Allison, you told me that you secured the valuable antiques. Auctions and all that sort of stuff.”

Allison sighed. “Well, remember that Leitner?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s things like that all over the place, apparently. Not just books, and not just the stuff Jurgen collected. Vases that rearrange your insides, notebooks that read you back, I even tracked a meat grinder all the way to Florida once. I buy them, and then it’s Mike’s job to hand them off to people who could use a little bit of loss in their lives.”

“Huh. Any of it Commission?”

“There’s been a briefcase, but I didn’t see anything familiar.” 

“Well, I’ve got some news for both of you, and there’s some things I’d like to hear out myself. If Mike seems so keen on getting a cup of tea, I’ll have the coffee.”

A few minutes later, Allison had put up the “closed for lunch” sign, and the three of them were in the antique store’s back room, sipping their choice of drink (tea for Allison and Mikaele, rather low-quality coffee for Five) around a rickety table among stacks of papers and, for some reason, spider traps. 

“So Allison, you told me you’ve been locating dangerous objects, and bringing them back for Mike to relocate. How did that, I mean- last time I saw you was in the Apocalypse.”

“Yeah.” Allison took a sip of her tea, looking off into the distance. “I tumbled out into these underground tunnels. I started to search for the rest of you, but no one else was there. Until today, I thought I was the only one left. I couldn’t speak and had no legal papers, so after I reached the surface and found it pouring I just ducked into the nearest shop I could- which turned out to be Salesa's Antiques.”

“I used to have a set of wind chimes installed that rang whenever someone who could be a threat walked in, but when Allison came to my store they started making strange noises. It took a while, and maybe three notepads’ worth of explaining, but eventually Allison told me her full story. I’d never heard anything like it. So you see, this world is roamed by things not like us - some call them the Entities- each of them is connected to a human fear. The Leitner that trapped you in that library was connected to the Lonely.”

“The Lonely?” Five asked.

“About as nice as it sounds, huh?” 

“I see.” He tried to repress a shudder. “Are any of them connected to, let’s say, strange tunnels, or maybe spirals?”

“The Distortion.” Allison breathed. “How would you know about that?”

“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, I know where Klaus is. The bad news, the only thing I heard of it is the Archives.”  
“Oh, that-”

“And then there’s worse news. The world is ending, soon, and it’s up to us to stop it.” 

Five expected that sentence to have some sort of effect on his sister and her coworker, but they just nodded. 

“The Unknowing. You’ve been here for a few hours, and you’ve already heard of the Unknowing.” Miakele said. 

“The  _ what? _ ”

“Well, you’d call it the Apocalypse.” Mikaele clarified. “But it’s really more than that.”

“No, sorry sorry.” Five waved Salea away. “You mean to tell me there’s an Apocalypse coming, and you  _ know?  _ And this time it’s connected to these-- these-”

“Entities.” The antique store owner clarified. “The personification of various human fears.”

“I don’t like the sound of that. Well, I’m the one with the news here: It’s happening, and it’s happening on October 28, 2019.”

“Five, you don’t understand.” Allison said. “The old apocalypse isn’t happening-”

“But another one is! And this time, the very fabric of reality tears apart. It won’t be the end of all life, just the end of life as we know it!” Five yelled. 

A few seconds of silence, then Mikaele took a deep breath. “So, the Unknowing succeeds this year. Allison?”

“Yes?”

“Get the camera.”

“No!” Allison looked furious. “DId you even hear what Five said? We have two weeks to work this out, and my family is here somewhere.”

“I gave you a job, and protection from the Fears!” Mikaele shouted back. “We worked this plan out together!”

“I thought I was the only one that survived!” Allison and Mikaele kept shouting, voices building up in a way that was all too familiar for Five’s taste. He took a deep breath, held out his hands, and prepared for the sharp pain of a jump. Not only half a second later, Five had picked up a particularly large antique hunting knife, and was holding it to Mikaele’s throat. 

“Now, Mikaele, we talk, or you get it.” He managed through gritted teeth. Allison stared at Five in shock, and began frantically shaking her head, but he kept going. “I think you owe me an explanation of what these Fears actually are, and why Allison hates your plan so much. I don’t know what you’ve done, and I don’t know who you are, but I can take you out if I need to.”

After a few seconds, Mikaele lets out a slow whistle. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard a death threat I couldn’t worm my way out of. I’ll be happy to tell you everything, but maybe the environment would be a bit better if you took that knife off my throat and I made us some tea, you think?” 

Five looked to Allison. “He’s safe.” She replied. 

“No, he’s not.” Five and Mikaele said at the same time. They looked at each other for a moment, then Five removed the hunting knife and Mikaele relaxed. 

“And if you have any  _ decent _ coffee, I’d kill for some.” Five added.

***

The three of them were sitted in a small room at the back of the antique store, which was furnished with a mishmash of cheap collapsible furniture, as well as antiques that were too stained, bumpy, or ripped to ever sell. Mikaele set down a cup of coffee in front of Five, who was perched on seven-eighths of an Edwardian dinner chair at a messy table across from Allison, and took his own seat. 

“Well, it looks like we have a lot to tell each other, but you start first.” Five said, and took a sip of his coffee. “What are the Entities? What do they do, and why would they want to end the world? What sort of protection can you offer my family?” 

“First things first- no one exactly knows what the Fears are, but the closest person to figuring it out was my former employer, Jurgen Leitner.”

“Leitner, as in the books?” Five asked. 

“Exactly. He was in my line of work with supernatural artefacts, but he had two unusual qualities. He specialized in books and, most importantly, he used them for his own research. For years, Jurgen tried to figure everything out about the Entities, Powers that Be, whatever you want to call them. Each of them- and there’s about fourteen of the big ones- is connected to a primal human fear. They’re not of our world- that’s for certain- and their only shady motivation is to spread fear, and one day control the entire world.” Five processed this- knowing that he was vulnerable to something called “The Lonely” didn’t exactly sit well with him. Mikaele proceeded to explain most of them, and none of them sounded light and fluffy to Five. 

“That’s where the Apocalypse comes in.” Allison spoke up. “There’s cultists and crazy people left, right, and center who think that a world subjected to their fear of choice would be a good scenario. So Mike and I look at powerful objects connected to the Fears, and shuffle them around so that no one who wants to cause the Unknowing can do it.” 

“Sounds good enough. Well, what’s Mike’s plan?”

“A few years ago, before I met Allison, I managed to acquire a camera that by some miracle, shielded me from the Entities’s watch. It would keep us safe in the Unknowing.”

“Could it protect, say, nine people?” Five asked, sizing up the room.”

“As long as they were under the same roof, sure.” Mikaele hesitantly added. Five allowed himself a grin; that was Plan B down. “Now, it’s your turn; what did you see?”

Five turned exclusively to Allison and said “The Apocalypse happened. A guy named Jon caused it, but I didn’t get a good look at him. I saw all of you, too- Klaus seemed fond of the Jon guy, and he mentioned something about the Archives in London. Then, I tried going to the library to search for the Archives, and you… saw the rest.”

“So what you’re telling me is, Klaus is at an Archive, and there’s a guy named Jon that’s going to cause the Unknowing?”

“Yes.” 

“And for you, it’s the same day as when we tried to save the world in 2019?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a couch near the back. Go to bed.”

_ “What?”  _ Five almost yelled. “No matter what I look like, Allison, I’m older here! Stop babying me!”

“I gave the same advice to Mikaele a few weeks ago.” Allison replied. “Being in an Entity’s domain is draining, and you’ve seen the world end twice in one day! I don’t care if the world is ending in twenty minutes- you’ve got a brand new gash in your chest and you’re going to sleep.” Allison really broke her commanding mom voice out, but Five barely bothered with a reaction. Then she added, “As your sister? Besides, if Klaus is really in the Archives, I won’t be able to stay there for long.”

“Why?”

“Because for months after I began working here, the gash Vanya made in my throat just wouldn’t heal. And then,” Allison looked down at her hands, “I met a woman trying to get her hands on a tatting shuttle marked by the Distortion. She told me that she liked my gift and thought that me being mute was a waste. I learned that Annabelle worked for the Web, and she told me- she told me that if I did too I might even be able to get Claire back.”

“The Web- lies and manipulation.” Five remarked. “Surely you didn’t say yes to whatever she offered you?”

“I did. How could I not? And ever since then, well-” Allison pulled down the collar of the turtleneck undershirt she wore to reveal the very same gash Vanya had made. Only this time, it was patched together by silvery patches of spider web that seemed to stretch her skin in unnatural ways.

Five closed his eyes and scrunched up his face, trying to reconcile himself with what he was seeing. “So I leave you guys alone for a few hours, and you manage to be in some sort of life contract with the  _ fear of being manipulated.  _ I need another cup of coffee.” Five turned on his heels and headed to the corner of the back room where Mikaele, who had left the conversation some time ago to sell a customer some vase or other, now hummed.

“Five! So, you know everything now?” He asked.   
“Yes.”

“I thought you’d be a little less mad, for starters.” Five just pushed on past the Frenchman, and began helping himself to not only the coffee, but also half a Saltine cracker that someone had left on the counter.

“Does anyone here have a car?” Both Allison and Mikaele nodded. “Good. Allison, I’m taking yours to the Archives, and you’re going along and finally telling me what in the world they are.” Not waiting for an answer, Five blinked behind Allison, reached into her sweatpants pocket, and pulled out a pair of car keys.

“Salesa, I trust you’ll have the camera ready if we need it?”

“No one agreed-”

“Right?” Five asked again, gesturing towards the hunting knife. “I’m not bound to an Entity, remember that. Try to use your  _ methods _ on me and see what happens.”

“I’ll have everything ready.” A few minutes later, Five was behind the wheel of Allison's car, with the owner herself in shotgun. 

“I still think you were too hard on Mike.” She grumbled.

“I got what I wanted, didn’t I?”

“I guess so.”

“Good.” Five said, and pressed the gas. 


	7. Postmortem Perspective (Klaus)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took a while, I was busy with other stuff then had major writer's block! But here's a non-intro chapter. TW first person POV of death, also the most major TMA spoiler yet so if you're reading this fandom-blind for TMA I suggest this is where you turn back

“Hey Tim!” Klaus looked up from the stack of statements head been thumbing through. He had been at the Archives for a week now, and so far every day had been the same. Get up to the sound of Ben complaining, try not to throw up from withdrawal, put the teapot on for Martin, and wait for the Archival staff to arrive. Then, Klaus was basically a glorified intern, helping Martin make tea and organising the Archives. 

“Hey Klaus!” Tim looked tired, but he gave Klaus one of his genuine grins. Klaus returned the smile; the two of them had instantly taken a liking to each other.“Looking sharp in those lace-up pants.”

“I’m so flattered.” Klaus extended a joking hand in Tim’s direction. Both guys laughed a little bit. 

“Seriously though, what’s the deal? You planning on actually working here anytime soon?” Tim asked.

“I’m not qualified.”

“Well, neither is Martin. Elias accepts all!” At that point, the door opened, and Jon stumbled in.

“Jon! Fancy seeing you here at this bright and early hour.” 

“Oh, you again.” Jon looked up. He looked even more tired than usual. Klaus thought about saying something, but would Jon listen to the American recovering junkie who talked to ‘thin air’. Fuck, he wouldn’t even listen to Martin! Besides, if there was one thing he learned from Diego, it was ‘don’t interfere with the stoic guy giving you room and board.’

“Hiya, boss.” Tim added, looking up from his messenger bag, which he had been rifling through. 

“It’s like there’s two of you.” Jon said, rubbing his temples. “Each more obnoxious than the last.”

Klaus and Tim both laughed at Jon’s rare joke, and even Ben, who had been looking at something in the far corner of the room, chuckled a little bit.

“Man, are you always such an asshole?” Klaus asked. Jon turned back, more annoyed than ever.

“You’re here for a reason, Klaus” Jon said, deadpan.

For once, Klaus didn’t need to fake his surprise. “I am?”

“Yes! And you two-” Jon stared pointedly at Tim then vaguely gestured between him and Klaus, “-need to get on task.” He trudged to his office, and closed the door behind him. 

“Geesh, something’s really got into him today.” Tim remarked. “But what did he mean by ‘you other two?’”

“Long story.”

“Well, I’ve got the time.” Tim smirked, and leaned onto the counter toward Klaus.

“Really? What do you want to know?”

“Well, how you got that tattoo, for instance.” Tim pointed at the umbrella logo on Klaus’s wrist. “It doesn’t quite… you know…. fit with your other tattoos?”

“Yeah, I got it when I was really little. Dad made me do it.” Klaus finally said. 

“Your dad made you get a tattoo?” Tim whistled. “I mean, you told me he wasn’t really there in your life, and ‘Diego throws a mean knife’ is an… interesting first description of your brother, but how weird _ is _ your family?” Tim laughed to himself. “Sorry, I really shouldn’t-”

“No, no, you’re right! My family was weird as fuck. I mean, you should have seen my brother Five. He’s like, this tall,” Klaus put a hand on his hip, “still wears his uniform every day, and he’s given the ‘I’ve done things your puny little mind couldn’t ever comprehend’ speech so many times I’ve pretty much memorized it.” Klaus began to laugh at his own description, but his eyes caught on a cup of tea haphazardly perched on a nearby desk. It was black, with a Magnus Institute log on the side, and all of a sudden Klaus remembered why he was here in the first place. “Yeah, you should have met Five while he was around.” Klaus finished.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Tim’s tone changed instantly. “I- I know what that’s like.”

“You do?” Klaus asked. Behind him, Klaus heard Ben’s footsteps as he paced the office, mumbling to himself about statements and boredom.

“Yeah.” His expression hardened for a second, which Klaus took to mean he didn’t want to talk about it. “Also, I have something to tell you.”

“Mmmpf.” Klaus grunted, shaking his head. “Wrong, wrong, wrong idea- do  _ not  _ trust me with anything.” There was another half-empty cup of tea beside Klaus (seriously, Martin fit every British stereotype), so he finished it in a few gulps. 

“No, it’s…” Tim made a vague hand gesture. “I heard your statement. Like, all of it. Martin listens to the statements occasionally, and he found this suspicious recording and a USB with the video on Jon’s desk.”

Klaus took a moment to consider it, then said. “Okay. You were going to find out eventually anyways.”

“So, you’re really from a place where the Magnus Institute doesn’t exist?”

“Yep.” Klaus looked around the cluttered room that served as the Archives. “But look on 

the bright side- we’re both stuck here now!”

“Yeah.” Tim laughed. “Life brings us all to the Archives in the end. And then you get absolutely shitfaced to forget about it.”

“And then no one tells you anything, because you’re a useless drunk bitch.” Klaus added. “But I can’t imagine having to deal with a boss like Jon. Was he always that much of an asshole?”

“Oh Jon cares. Deep, deep, down.” Tim said, then added. “But he’s also a bit of an asshole.”

“Ugh. Feels like a lot of people I know.” They didn;t get to finish the conversation though, they heard muffled yelling from Jon’s office. Both guys hurried away to do something productive before whoever was making all that noise turned their attention on them.

***

“Statement recorded by Number Four ‘Klaus’ Hargreeves, glorified intern of the Magnus Institute, London” Klaus drawled. For the past two hours, Jon had been asking Klaus to record statements, which wouldn’t be so bad if Klaus had a drink or a smoke, or at least didn’t have to use his full legal name. Klaus could really do without being reminded of his family right now, but Jon insisted. 

Klaus sighed, and in that moment the door from the hallway that led to Elias’s office opened. Martin came out pale-faced and worried looking. 

“Elias wants to see you.” Klaus sighed, and turned off the recording. 

“Isn’t he the boss guy I was  _ definitely not  _ supposed to show myself to?”

“Um… yeah.”

“When I die, tell Tim he’s super hot for me, okay?” Klaus asked. Martin just shifted from foot to foot. Klaus stepped out into the hallway and let Martin take him to a door labeled  _ E. Bouchard, Head of the Institute _ . 

“Well, he shouldn’t be able to do anything too bad.” Martin tried to reassure Klaus. “I’ve seen Elias before, and even though he isn’t exactly nice keeps the meetings professional.”

“Thanks Martin.” Klaus pushed open the door. The inside of Elias’s office was startlingly neat and impersonal, and decorated more Victoran than underpaid-office. The only personal touch was a framed up-close photograph of what looked to be an old man’s eye. Klaus knew it was just a photo, but the eye creeped him out.

“Sit down, Klaus.” Elias said, in a way that left Klaus no choice but to quietly sit in the red armchair opposite Elias’s desk.

“It has come to my attention that during one of his more interesting projects, Jon found and brought you to the Archives. And since then, you’ve been living in an old storage closet and helping out around the Archives as almost a sort of intern?” Elias’s voice was cold and quiet, but it demanded Klaus’s attention because suddenly, he felt like this Elias knew all his secrets. 

“Well, that’s most of the story, I think. Believe me, I don’t think anyone has all of it, though.”

“I do, because by  _ you  _ I mean, of course, you and your brother Ben.” Klaus was stunned into silence. “Ben, the ghost by your side who’s been wandering off more and more lately, right? And you can feel that there’s something wrong here, something squashing down your powers, Seance. Because I know all about that, too. I know about your childhood, and about the way you’ve felt the atmosphere of this place be so off, as if there’s something it’s hiding from you and your world-saving tendencies, however they may have failed last time.”

“I- How do you-” Klaus stammered. 

“Actually, let me check.” Elias said.

Klaus had experienced tons of weird things, including being Rumoured by Allison- an unpleasant feeling like something foreign was reaching into your mind and rearranging it, and he was too familiar with the sensation of a ghost.This felt like a combination of the two; Elias wasn’t quite  _ alive _ , but he wasn’t dead either, and Klaus could feel Elias poking and prodding around in his head until he grasped some string of thought and read it back.

Klaus was left cold from the inside and shuddering, but he pulled himself together just in time to see Elias raise a single eyebrow.

“Withdrawal? I’ve experienced that before, but you- your family was so angry and so disappointed in you, just like Dad was when you began suppressing your powers on purpose. Even Ben was disappointed in you, and to cope after his death, you summoned him. But being a ghost didn’t agree with Ben, and now both of you are bitter.”

“How do you know this?” Klaus half-yelled. His chest was tight, as if someone had struck a vacuum into it, and when he felt like giving out Klaus sunk into his chair. “I never said any of this in my statement!”

“Easy enough:” Eliad, eager to make up the distance Klaus had slumped away from him, leaned forward in his chair with a sickly glint in those cold, pale eyes. “I know everything. Now, back to the present moment; you and Ben are mad at each other. Part of it is because you’re both terrible people-”

“Says the mind-reading freak boss!” Klaus was close to tears. “Please, just stop.”

“Oh, no, you need to hear this. In part because of the Archive. It suppresses connections. Fills the air with something that shouldn’t be there.And I’m guessing you want to know what’s going on?”

The only advice Klaus had ever been given in the Magnus Institute was ‘avoid Elias’. But in that moment he so  _ desperately needed  _ to know that Klaus found himself nodding.

“I said that this is a place of knowledge- not just knowing things, but Knowledge as a sentient entity existing of its own accord. It’s too vast to be alive, per se, but it fuels the institute. And anything that vast, humanity fears.”

“So what you’re saying is-”

“The Magnus Institute serves the Ceaseless Watcher, the human fear of knowledge.” 

Klaus’s mind went blank for a few seconds, until finally he shrugged. “I mean why not, at this point. My life is shitty enough as is, I can take this.”

“You can’t get out of here. The same way you can’t quite ever get clean, or clear-headed, or never get Ben to talk to you about what’s on his mind.”

“You know everything, I’ve got it!” Klaus said, torn between fear and exasperation. “But why are you poking around my head?”

“Should we start with a warm up? Your standalone spinoff comic book-  _ Seance takes on the haunted museum?  _ How your brother left and you started your little drug habit? I can go on and on, Klaus. There’s so much pain to choose from!”

Klaus had passed his limit a long time ago, but he still had to say “Do you enjoy this?”

“A little bit.” He smirked, just the smallest quirk of the mouth.

Then any hint of a smile dropped. “But some of your more- ah- unique capabilities have already begun to upset the natural flow of things here. Can’t have you summoning Gertrude, and Jon _ will  _ make you try. So, Klaus, save your brother’s statement for later?”

“And what happens if I try to run away?”

“Hah! This place is a temple, and however gruesome you might find the god, the streets and unwashed masses are ravenous for you. So,” Elias smiled, “Statement of Ben Hargreeves, regarding all the things he never said. Statement never given.”

Klaus took a shaky breath and closed his eyes. “Well, this can’t be worse than torture.”

When Elias spoke next, his voice took on a particular quality that almost- but now quite- mimicked the tired tones Ben used. “A lot of people think that death is painful. They’re afraid of that final moment, about seven seconds after their heart beats for the last time.But I know that death isn’t painful. It’s a sweet release. What  _ is _ painful are the moments before the gruesome death I had. We were sixteen, and headed to an area of some city I can’t remember anymore, a large part of which was controlled by conflicting gangs and militias. And Klaus- Klaus was high, hungover, weakened from years of substance abuse he had started when he had barely hit fourteen. Luther was distracted by something, Allison’s voice was hoarse so she could barely use her rumors. So on and so forth. Of course I had to be the mission leader. I always hated missions, but I tried not to let it show. I pretended to lead with the same fervor that Luther and Diego always did. Well, someone managed to get so close to me that they sliced the base of a tentacle from the Thing I could summon, and it spazzed out, giving me a blind spot that one of them took advantage of. Heh,” Elias scoffed, a disturbing sight in his Ben impression, “What did he expect us to do?

I knew I was dead when I was in the dark and saw a beam of light in the distance. I tried to summon the Thing, but for the first time in my life I was completely cut off from everyone. I tried to run from the light, but I never got any further, until Klaus summoned me as a ghost. To be honest, I don’t know how he did it. I was so happy to get a last goodbye that I tried to stretch it out, and it stretched and stretched until I realised that I could stay here, as a ghost, for the rest of Klaus’s life. 

“Things were good for a few months, but the others began to talk to Klaus less- he made no secret of any of his coping mechanisms, but talking to thin air was a bit much. Except Diego, who knew what it was like to be the family weirdo. And as nice as it was to see my siblings get some quality time, the way I was glued to Klaus’s side made me a fucking nucianse-” Klaus flinched at hearing Elias swear on Ben’s behalf- “and the two of us began to argue more and more. Klaus didn’t hold my free will in high regard, always doing his own thing and expecting me to spectate, so I wasn’t afraid to guilt trip Klaus a little to get what I wanted. 

When the world began to end, I thought that after Klaus could summon me corporeally it could be a new start. But now I’m stuck in this shithole, with Klaus in those weird Archivists’ company, and my family out there. I can’t even try to reconnect with anyone. I’m trapped, and it fucking blows.” Elias smiled, letting Ben’s demeanor slide off him. “Should I get into more, Klaus?”

“No. I’ve got it.” Klaus said, trying to blink tears out of his eyes as Ben’s words in Elias’s voice bounced around his head.

“Good. You may leave.”

“Just- go back to the Archive wing? No time-traveling suitcases that ruin your life or passing out in worm-filled tunnels? I can go back?”

“Go, before I reconsider. And please, get the tape recorder on the way out, will you?” Shakily, Klaus stood up, and held out his hand for Elias to drop a tape recorder into. 

As Klaus was opening the door, Elias called in his regular, non-mind-readery voice, “Remember, there’s more to a Seance than ghosts!” Klasu almost tripped over his own feet on the way out, only to discover that Tim was waiting outside the door.

“‘More to a Seance than ghosts’? What does that mean?” He asked. 

“Oh, uh, nothing.”

“Are you okay, you look a bit shaken up?” Tim’s voice grew a bit darker, “Wouldn’t want you going down the same way Jon did.”

Klaus held up a shaky finger. “I need to get absolutely shitfaced. Can’t-remember-my-own-name drunk, preferably high at the same time, and if I die I die. What’s the best you’ve got?”

“No!”

“What?!”

“You’re freshly clean, and you need to stay that way.”

“You sound like Ben. I thought you were nice, Tim.”

“Whatever bullshit Elias told you, we need to work it out together!”

“I need to never talk to Ben again.”

“Ben as in your….”

“Dumbass ghost brother.” Klaus said. 

“What did Elias  _ do  _ to you?” Tim asked. Klaus met his eyes, and there was genuine concern in them. “I mean, I’ve seen people leave his office pale, but what hit you?” 

Klaus was about to brush Tim off, but he stopped. “Can you tell me about Gertrude?”

“Gertrude… Robinson?”

“The old Archivist.”

“Yeah that would be her.” Tim looked confused and worried, but he stepped closer. “But only if you tell me what’s going on.”

Elias would probably murder him for it, or male him listen to a behind-the-scenes audiobook version of his other siblings’ most hurtful feelings, but at this point Klaus didn’t care. He needed to feel better about something quick, and to spend as much time as possible out of this miserable Archives, for which he needed a friend who knew their way around the area. 

“Okay, I need to say something anyway, but is there anywhere else we can go? Someplace a little more-”

“Populated? Casual? Elias-free?” Tim finished for him. 

Klaus had to smile a little. “Yeah, exactly.”

***

Twenty minutes later, they found themselves in a small but very busy cafe where Tim was apparently a regular. Klaus understood that his appearance of week-old clothes he had been wearing at the Apocalypse, a cheap Magnus Institute shirt, American accent, and messy hair halfway down his neck was attracting a few strange looks. 

“Sorry for ruining your reputation here.” Klaus said, gulping down his coffee. “Oh, now I get why Five loves this stuff. Really calms you down after something happens.”

“Yeah, speaking of that, what did happen I mean, you looked beyond shaken up.”

“Elias.” Klaus scoffed. “He… knew a lot more about me then it seems like he should, and then he started talking about secrets I never told anyone, or other people’s secrets. Elias kept comparing the Institute to something I can’t quite place my finger on?”

Tim’s expression hardened, and he stopped wiping the spilled tea from the rickety table with a napkin. “Well, there’s stuff about the place that’s very off, I’ve known. So I guess it makes sense.”

“You aren’t freaked the fuck out?”

“Oh, I am. I’ve just been expecting something like this for a long time. There’s a lot I haven’t told you about life in the Institute yet.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” Klaus said. “Me too.”

“I listened in on your statement, remember?”

“You really think I told Jon, some weird guy in a new place, everything about everything?”

“Yeah, okay, makes sense. But, uh, do you want me to start with Gertrude?”

“Sure.” And Tim started with Gertrude, but once he finished, the story of her murder didn’t bother Klaus quite as much as the fact that it was now time for them to go back to the Institute, so Tim talked about his old job at a publishing firm, and Klaus told his a few of his Umbrella Academy stories, and a few hours later the two of them were sitting on a park bench, looking at the dark sky and sharing how they came to the Institute.

“I had enough problem with that fucking circus as is, now there’s a Ceaseless Watcher to worry about.” Tim sighed, and buried his face in his hands. Klaus did the only thing he could and put an arm on Tim’s shoulder, hand spanning a bright purple flower on his Hawaiian shirt. 

“Life is shit like that.” Klaus looked at Tim, and around taking in London for the first time. In the few weeks he had been living in the Institute, he had never actually needed to go out much, but this evening was the most Klaus had seen of town. Now that he was there with Tim, London seemed almost comforting. 

A man in a black leather jacket over a hoodie came into Klaus’s view, and he realized that he hand't seen Ben since this morning. Well, never mind; Klaus didn’t think he could talk to Ben after what had happened with Elias, so the more he read statements in the corner of the Archives the better. Right now, there were other things on his mind.


	8. Time to Fill (Ben)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I pulled a lot of the ghost stuff out of my ass tbh, but there's very little about afterlives of people replaced by the Not!Them in the tmaverse, so some artistic liberties had to be taken. No beta on this, we die like Ben and Sasha

As usual, Ben was awake, and Klaus was’t; ghosts didn’t need to sleep, or eat, or, according to Klaus, alone time. Well, for at least four, and more often ten hours a day Ben didn’t need to worry about what Klaus thought, and since his dear brother’s ghost powers were weaker when he was unconscious, Ben had a bit more leeway than normal when it came to exploring the rest of the Institute. 

And, as much as Ben wished that Klaus would get on to the whole finding-their-siblings part of their stay in London, these Archives were like heaven. Now that Klaus didn’t particularly notice the effort it took Ben to interact with the world, he could read statements all day. Or wander over to the library nearby, but that Martin guy seemed to have some leftover fondness for the place’s immaculate organisation, and the statements were usually funnier, so unnoticed by even Klaus, Ben started taking on the role of an archival assistant for fun. 

This morning, though, he was restless. Klaus had decided to have a fitful sleep in his storage closet, and the stacks upon stacks of folders didn’t look inviting, so Ben just paced the Archives and the surrounding offices, paying no regards to the walls. 

Eventually, Ben wandered into a hallway that led into something called  _ Artefact Storage- authorised personnel only.  _ That sign caught his attention; Sasha had mentioned working in Artefact Storage, and there were rumors floating around of the many strange things it housed. As for the authorisation part, what could they do to a dead guy? Ben shrugged to no one in particular and walked through the door. 

Immediately, he noticed the difference, not even counting the dark red walls. The most obvious thing was that Artefact Storage looked more like a cross between an antique store, a garage sale, and a crime scene, with everything from expensive-looking antique paintings to bags of deformed action figured cluttering up the room, with seemingly random items in reinforced boxes or with several feet of space marked around them. 

In the middle of it all, though, was the weirdest sight Ben had ever seen. A young woman was kneeling in the middle of Artefact Storage, head in her hands as if she was on the brink of breaking down. Because of the things the Institute studied, this wasn’t too unusual, but on second glance, the slight shimmer in her shape told Ben that she was a ghost like him.

“Hey?” Ben called out. Immediately, she looked up, and Ben got a better look at the woman’s face. Or rather- should have gotten a better look, because as Ben stepped closer to her, he couldn’t quite pin her features down. She had dark skin and dark hair, but when Ben tried to focus on her it was as if something was blocking the signal between his eyes and his brain. Ben took a deep but unnecessary breath, and continued “Who are you? How are you here?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t that weird?” The woman said. She got up and moved closer to Ben. “I mean, I don’t have a lot of memory, and no one else has noticed me. Am I some sort of ghost?”

“I think so. I mean, that’s what I am.” Ben said. 

“You’re a ghost?” She asked. “ I know that all sorts of weird things are real, you don’t work where I did without seeing some stuff. But I don’t know where I worked, and I don’t know who I am. I sort of just know that I’m dead, and I remember some of the people who show up here and things like that. But it’s like someone… something took my identity.” The woman smiled apologetically. She had a nice smile, Ben noticed, if a little out of place with the stiff way she spoke.

“What about you?”

“I’m Ben. Uh, Ben Hargreeves.” Ben waited for the moment of confusion head came to expect by watching his siblings introduce themselves followed by realisation that they were part of the Umbrella Academy, but remembered that in this version of London, they weren’t supposed to exist. Good; Ben didn’t need his sob story seared into anyone’s brain by the tabloids, so he continued, “I died when I was sixteen, and my brother’s a bit of a ghost expert, so he brought me back and I’ve sort of been, you know..” Ben gestured vaguely, not quite knowing what word to use. “around? For seventeen years now.”

“That’s a long time.” The woman said. 

Ben laughed. “Yeah. It gets pretty boring after a while, let me tell you that. But at least we can see each other! And you listen, that’s already more than I’ve had in a while.” The woman’s smile stretched a little bit wider, and Ben realised that he was mirroring her expression. He shifted from foot to foot; here at last was someone that Ben could actually talk to, maybe a friend, and the fact that she didn’t know who she was only gave Ben a reason to look more alert as Klaus raved to him about how he found the Institute untrustworthy.

Speaking of that, Ben cleared his throat. “Well, do you at least have a name?”

“Yeah, It’s Sasha.” Sasha finally got up off her knees, and walked over to the part of the room Ben was standing in. “Can’t remember the last name, but I suppose Sasha is good enough.”

“Yeah, there’s not a lot of Sashas around.”

“There  _ is  _ one.”

“Sasha James, archival assistant, worked in Artefact Storage before her job there and as assistant librarian before that, but hated her library job. Makes her and Martin argue sometimes, but all the archival assistants like each other for their no-nonsense approach to work, even if Tim’s jokes make her roll her eyes. Sasha’s favorite color is grey and she hates it when her glasses get dirty.”

“How do you know that much?” Sasha asked.

“If I know a lot about people, it’s almost like talking to them.” Ben exhaled nervously; he never told anyone about his little fact-sheet habit, but Ben didn’t think it was weird or anything. Well, maybe it was a little weird for most people, but Ben didn’t exactly have much else to do.

“Aah. That must be terrible. Well, I’m tired of sitting around trying to remember who I am, and you must have like, years of things you’ve wanted to tell someone. You got the time?”

Ben didn’t even notice that the hours had passed until he felt himself being tugged back to the Archives storage closet, which meant it was somewhere around eight o’clock, which meant that four whole hours had passed since Ben’s little tour to Artefact storage. As the tug got stronger, Ben said “Uh, do you mind if I leave for like, a few minutes? I just need to sort some stuff out.”

“Um, yeah.” Sasha looked crestfallen. “I’ll make sure to try that self-solidifying trick you taught me.”

“Bye!” Ben waved and turned to walk away. As soon as he was out of sight, Ben gave in to the force that dragged him towards Klaus and half-ran, half-floated towards the folders of statements and hidden janitor’s closets that, by the grace of whatever deity or entity was up there, had a working sink. Ben settled in around the stacks of statements, but somehow the endless folders filled with eyewitness reports of the supernatural didn’t have quite the same appeal that they used to. 

Over the next three days, Ben talked to Sasha every time he could get to Artefact Storage, which mostly meant between nine in the morning and seven A.M. the following day. As the hours crawled on he found it easier to stay there even as Klaus was awake. Ben felt kind of bad for spending all his time with Sasha, but Klaus seemed to be adjusting to his new life at the Institute pretty well, if with a certain degree of unease, and Sasha was the first real friend he’d had in a long time. 

Still, Ben hadn’t used Klaus’s powers to move something corporeal in a while, so right now was the best time. That morning, after heating up the kettle for Martin with Klaus, Ben walked over to the far corner of the Archives. Soon though, someone walked through the door. 

“Hey Tim!” Klaus said on the other side of the room. Ben groaned to himself; as happy as he was that Klaus had found a more or less stable friend, the two of them together could only be classified as a destructive force set to test the limits of Ben’s nerves. Oh, well. 

Ben fished out a statement at random, and was pleased to see that Klaus either didn’t notice, or the effort was miniscule to him now. The statement itself was nothing too special, just some dude claiming he was rescued from a man who wanted to “take his bones! I’m not drunk, I swear there was a bone man!” by a woman who moved too quickly and someone that looked human, but couldn’t be because it made knives and tree branches do things that the laws of physics would never allow. At least, that’s how the eyewitness described his saviors; Ben had heard Jon say that someone who had to send their statement in letter form from the hospital due to head trauma probably hallucinated if not the whole scenario, then the “bone man” and mysterious rescuers. It was most likely that James Levi, the statement-giver, was just a victim of an ordinary failed mugging.

Still, a dark, gruff man with knives made Ben think of Diego. Klaus said he would feel it if the others died, so was it possible that Diego not only survived but also ended up in 2017 London, and went back to his old ways? What about the blonde woman? No, no, the statement-giver was too hurt to write a coherent sentence, much less give an accurate description of Diego and a mysterious new accomplice fighting off whatever a bone man was.

“You aren’t even taking me seriously!” Ben was jerked out of his thoughts by slightly muffled yelling from the head archivist’s office. It startled him so much, in fact, that Ben dropped the statement and almost ran to the first place he could think of: Artefact Storage. 

Sasha was inspecting an old sofa with the determined expression of a researcher Ben had come to recognise as a researcher’s. 

“Hey Ben!” She looked up. “I thought you were at the Archives today.”

“Oh, yeah. There was nothing in the statements.” He said. “You know, do you think you might be a researcher? You had the same expression I always see on their faces just now, studying that couch.”

“Well, I must have been, right? How else could I have ended up here? But I don’t know; I just heard some of the others talk about how “when Sasha worked here, she used to love to keep looking at that couch.”” Sasha finished. 

“So, you do want to find out who you are?” 

Sasha hmphed. “You thought I was just fine with existing like this, not knowing my past, a ghost forever?”

Ben paused for a second, and looked down at his hands. “I mean… yeah? I just sort of learned to live with almost the same thing.”

“You’re nice, Ben, don’t get me wrong-” She continued. 

“Yeah, okay.” Ben cut her off; he knew exactly where this was going. “I’m just tired of people not telling me things because I’m a ghost, or just ignoring what I say.”

“Who does that?”

“Klaus. Well, of course him, he’s the only person I can really talk to, but even when I spoke with Jon he barely took me seriously.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Yeah, and sorry for never realising you had your own stuff going on.” Ben sighed, “I guess Klaus is rubbing off on me.”

“Is he really that bad?” Sasha laughed.

“Maybe? I don’t know. But, uh, show me what you’ve got.” Even though Sasha couldn't touch anything, her memory was good enough to remember things and compile them as she walked around Artefact Storage, out into the library, and even to a closet piled with old junk, piecing together bits and pieces. Ben brought some paper and a pen to write everything down, and a few hours later the two of them sat in the middle of a hallway, reviewing everything Shasha had noticed so far. 

“Okay, so there was only ever one Sasha in Artefact Storage, but she’s moved to the Archives now,” Ben bagan, “which is where I spend a lot of time, and I can say that Sasha is very much alive and well.”

“However-” Sasha motioned for Ben to flip a notebook Ben stole from the archives over- “We have this entry from April third of this year by a Sasha James that doesn’t match archives Sasha James’s handwriting.” Ben moved to flip the journal open, but his hand passed through it. He rolled his eyes; interacting with the physical world was still tricky. Be tried again, and again, but his hand passed through it.

“Ben?” Sasha asked. “Are you- what’s going on?”

“Probably an off day, happens sometimes.” Ben tried to keep the concern out of his voice. “Sometimes Klaus is too distracted or too high to remember me, and then my link to this world starts to loosen. It’s pretty frustrating.’ Be kept trying to pick up the stupid notebook. He probably should have given it a moment, but Ben had felt helpless for seventeen years. He still remembered his vivid sixteen-year-old panic at walking through a wall, and he wasn’t going to be helpless again. The tugging sensation that told him Klaus was across from the Archives, presumably slacking off work, started to fade, replaced by a feeling of lightness and a pain in his stomach and down the left side of his face. 

“Ben? Ben! Are you passing out? Can you do that?” Sasha sounded panicked, but her voice was muffled and distorted as if he was underwater. 

He muttered, “No. no no no-” 

And woke up in a dim basement lit with unnatural blue light from the staircase above. Except, in the darkest corner, was another type of light; warm, welcoming, and Ben knew it was meant for him. 

“I am  _ not  _ giving up this easy.” He said out loud. “I know I’m still scared, but you can’t take me yet!” He began pacing up and down the room. “I didn’t get to say goodbye!” Ben held a hand out to the wall, and found that both his hand and the wall were solid. 

Ben hadn’t had to think about walking through walls ever since he was sixteen and just learning to live after death, but in a fit of panic he closed his eyes and whispered to himself;

“I’m not alive, and I don’t take up space. These walls do, so I can just walk through them. Just-” Ben gritted his teeth like he had sixteen years ago, and clenched his fists, “Walk. Through.” 

After all this time, Ben still wasn’t sure how he could stand on the ground or sit down. Maybe things big enough didn’t notice that he wasn’t really there. This time though, Ben knew that it was the walls that weren’t real, and somehow being more alive than the light he had spent half of his existence running from kept him from running headfirst into the basement walls, and Ben was never more relieved to hear the distant sounds of Klaus’s laughter. 

It wasn’t until he stumbled into Elias’s office that he realised that something was wrong. 

***

“And what happened?” Sasha asked. “Yeah, Elias is creepy as fuck, but why are you so creeped out?”

Ben tried to control his expression as he said, “It was nothing.”

“Are you sure about that?” Sasha responded with an unusual amount of challenge in her voice. “You know, I’m just as involved in the weird goings-on of this place as you are. I’ve got more at stake in this than you do!”

“In the weird conversations Elias has with my brother?”

“Yeah!” Sahsa gestured into the air as if Ben was stupid. “All I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember is to find out who I am, and if I have someone who can see ghosts on my side I might actually get that! And then we’ll see if I can go back to whatever life I was living, or at least…” Sasha looked down, and Ben noticed that she was close to tears. 

“Die in peace?” He finished softly. 

“Yeah.” Sasha’s voice was still bitter, but not as angry now. “You know, the real tragedy of it all is-”

“Just sitting there, not being able to do anything? Nowhere to go, Nowhere to change.”

“Exactly.” Sasha straightened up.

“Yeah, I know what that feels like. You know, I’ve been a bit wrapped up in my own fucked-up mystery a little too much, and may have been putting off helping you. Sorry about that.”

“Yeah by the way, what are you doing here?”

“Same as you; I’m trying to figure out where someone is. Only this time, it’s my other siblings.”

“You have other siblings?”

“Five of them.”

“But you’re in your thirties, right? Why would you need to know where they are?”

“Well, it’s a long story.”

“You say that about everything.” Sasha leaned forward. “And I’ve got time.” Ben weighed his options; tell Sasha everything or keep not telling her things. Obviously, there were risks; he had no idea who Sasha was before death, and after listening to Elias’s ramblings about bloodthirsty gods Ben wasn’t sure who he could trust. Still, Sasha was obviously a researcher at heart and used to follow breadcrumbs to information, and Klaus wouldn’t meet his eyes now.

“Eyes.” Ben whispered to himself, trying to get the memory of Elias’s eyes out of his head. When Ben stood still in that office, still too unsure to lean against the wall and too afraid to sit down, Elias stared right at him, analyzing Ben. At first, he wasn’t scared; Ben had seen worse than creepy-eyed institute heads, and the fact that the guy seemed to horrify Klaus didn’t concern Ben much either; the brothers didn’t talk much these days and in any case that guy would pop a few pills and cower at a long shadow only a few months ago. It was an interesting act, but if all Elias was was another ghost-seer who couldn’t keep his weird cult out of his work that wasn’t Ben’s problem. No, the terror had started when Elias had reached into Ben’s brain with a cold and foreign touch and read his secrets out loud. 

“Eyes?” Sasha’s voice jerked Ben out of contemplation. “What do you mean, eyes? If you mean disturbing eye imagery, there’s a lot of research-”

“Yeah, that’s at the very end of my life story.” Ben cut her off. For all her helpfulness, Sasha had a tendency to go on and on about scholarly articles she couldn’t remember reading, and sometimes Ben got tired, and annoyed at the world, and plain creeped out. “You ever heard about interdimensional time travel?”

  
  



	9. Blue Lights (McMullen)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters from this point on will take longer, since we're getting into the real fun part

McMullen knew he’d officially lost it when the sky opened up, and a shaft of blue light shone down. He couldn’t be high- the latest attempt at rehab had actually made some sense, and McMullen was going clean. Getting a nice job somewhere that didn’t mind his tattoos, or the fact that McMullen couldn’t turn his neck to the left. 

So when the blue, pulsing light started shining and the wind blew McMullen into the wall headfirst so hard it was a miracle he didn’t break something else. Well, McMullen did the same thing he did whenever things got too bad; curled up in fetal position and shut his eyes to block out the light, trying to ignore the ringing in his ears.

Suddenly, there was a loud thump, a metallic clang, and everything stopped. McMullen dared to look up; the street had returned to normal, except for the figure standing in the middle of it. The figure was tall, like a basketball player with a bodybuilder’s physique. It was standing face away to McMullen, but he didn’t see much else because of the trenchcoat, or the blood in his eyes. Maybe he did break something.

McMullen was seriously thinking about screaming, but he didn’t have the time; the figure, seconds after landing, started stumbling around the alleyway. 

` “Allison?” He half-yelled. “Five? Klaus? Diego? Vanya?” The figure, which McMullen had nicknamed Trenchcoat, screamed, getting more and more desperate. Was he Australian? McMullen had been hit pretty hard in the head, but he was pretty sure he talked funny. 

_ “Allison!”  _

“Allison…” McMullen moaned back, the last thing he did before he passed out. 

***

McMullen woke up a few feet away from the alley in which he had passed out, but he wasn’t sore in any new places. That was unusual; usually the people that knocked him out took the liberty of a few post-victory punches, but McMullen had been clumsily sprawled out on the ground, and when he reached up to check, his head had been wrapped with some mostly clean white cloth. 

Trenchcoat was gone, but as McMullen got up he noticed that his cash pocket was noticeably lighter. Great; no one he had a debt to would ever believe McMullen had been mugged by a sky man. As he reached into it though, McMullen’s fist closed on a piece of paper. He stretched it out in his hand, and read out the messy scrawl in permanent marker. 

“SORRY.” He read out, “NEED BRITISH MONEY. CONTACT-” there was a symbol scrawled on the paper; something loosely described as a circle with a stylized umbrella. Clearly Trenchcoat was in some sort of sky-falling scene, one that McMullen wanted nothing to do with. 

***

Four months later, McMullen drummed his fingers on the petrol station counter, trying to convince himself that the way customers glanced at his name tag and called him “Toby” with the slightly awkward tone of someone meeting him for the first time. After all, a skinny guy with matted hair, bad tattoos, and something that resembled the torture device version of half a neck brace made a bit of an impression. 

The bell rang, and McMullen prepared himself for another forced interaction. Instead, he was greeted by a very angry schoolboy jangling car keys and half-dragging an exasperated-looking lady into the gas station. McMullen thought they were an odd pair; the woman was black and the boy was white so he couldn’t be her son, and she was too well-dressed to be his babysitter, and while they were mad at each other, neither raised their voice, and the next thirty seconds were occupied by them arguing in hushed tones.

He caught, “...not the Institute! I’ve got to get there!” The boy definitely had an American accent.

“You’ve… to rest! I keep-”

“Did you hear me, Allison? The-”

Finally, at full volume, Allison exclaimed, “I’m thirty-three, I can take care of myself!” 

“Then why is your neck held together by a bit of spider web?” Both arguers instantly went quiet, and McMullen himself was shocked into silence. Spider web? Not that he hadn’t seen some weird shit before, like the way Lee Rentoul’s life went down the drain. But still-

McMullen looked up, and was met with the icy blue eyes of the kid, and was hit by how  _ wrong  _ he looked. Ordinary schoolboy at first, but he had a tension to him that made McMullen think of seasoned fighters, or maybe a taekwondo black belt. 

The boy spoke with a faux-easy tone, “You didn’t hear anything, did you, kid?”  _ Kid _ ? McMullen was twenty-two, nowhere near old but certainly nowhere young enough to be talked down to by a teenager.

“Uhm.” He managed. “About…” The boy straightened with a resolution. 

McMullen wasn’t sure what happened next, all he knew was that in the span of half a second, there were two flashes of blue light, and when Allison walked out to the counter with a packet of crisps is was to a spilled display case and the boy with a lighter very close to a pinned down Toby McMulen.

Allison dropped her crisps right then and there, and stood, dumbstruck, before gathering herself. “Five, he’s not Commission, and not one of mine. Not all of us are exempt from the law, remember? You can’t just go around killing people because they get in your way.” 

Five-whatever-his-name-was breathed out “He could be a threat,” but flicked off the lighter. “You don’t speak of this, okay?” McMullen nodded. If he knew anything, it was how to keep his mouth shut. Five (Maybe that was short for something) demonstratively put the lighter up, and in doing so exposed something on his wrist- an umbrella in a circle tattoo.

“Wait!” McMullen half-yelled. “Do you have the money?”

“The money?” Allison asked.

“Yeah! Wait, let me- let me just-” He’d kept the jacket, so it took only a few seconds of searching the pockets before McMullen found the crumpled piece of paper. “Here!” He waved it.

Allison wasn’t as inhumanly fast as Five, so it took a few seconds, but both of them squinted at the drawing, and Allison held out her own wrist to reveal an identical umbrella, which made McMullen jumpy. Two of these people so far had commanded flashes of blue light and the remaining one had some sort of spider-throat issue, so was this a magic cult? If so, better to cooperate.

“Just like the one Dad gave us…” Allison frowned. 

“Commission. They had all my details; this could be a threat.”

“There’s no Commission here! You, what’s your name?”

“McMullen. Toby McMullen.”

“Okay. Toby,” Allison said patiently, “What did the person who left this note look like?”

“Came in through the sky, there was a big wind that knocked me to the wall. Tall dude, built like a gorilla, but I didn’t get a good look at him; I passed out and woke up with most of my cash gone.”

Allison’s face furrowed in an expression McMullen had never seen before, until she said “Luther. He’s still out there.”

“Apparently so. But we need to get to the institute.” Five shot back.

“No! Look, let’s discuss this in the car, and this time I’m driving.” Allison turned to McMullen again. “Do you know where he went?”

“No, but if he took the money I got from Angela he found her note, and big bloke like him she’d be interested.”

“Luther wouldn’t sell himself, if that’s what you’re implying.” Allison retorted. She seemed to do more of the talking, McMullen noted.

“No! Of course not. Angela does the same things you do-”

“And that is?” Five finally replied.

“Makes people disappear. Magic woman, the real kind. I’ve seen it happen.” 

“What do you think, Five?”

“He’s a crackpot.” Five made a vague gesture, and plucked a Swiss army knife off the counter without bothering to pay for it. “But he knows where Luther is, and if our only two leads are Klaus in an Eye stronghold that Mikaele and the Web would fuck me up if I ever set foot in it, or Luther in an unspecified location.” By now, McMullen wished he had kicked them out or something. Well, there wasn’t much he could do against these magic weirdos anyway, so McMullen just nodded, hoping to hurry them out of the gas station. 

Meanwhile, for once Allison didn’t have anything to correct about Five’s opinion, instead she just added, “Yeah, I’d rather not die if that’s okay with you.”

“So, Luther?”

“Yeah.” Allison started to turn around, and McMullen breathed a sigh of relief, determined to return to the boredom of not having a cheap lighter at his throat. He barely got a moment, though, because Five walked over, determined, and grabbed his arm. 

“You’re going with us, kid.” Again with the talking down, but Five’s grip was too strong for him to express his offence.

McMullen said the only thing that came to mind; “What would my boss say?”

“I don’t care.” Five said. 

“Hey!” Allsion turned back. “Five, I appreciate the whole driven thing, but can’t we be a little more careful about this?”

“You can’t even understand what I’m trying to-”

“Do? This is my job, Five.” Allison straightened up. “And I heard a rumor-” McMullen felt a shockwave of pale blue light, the same color as the other two umbrella people’s jumps, travel out from Allison, revealing half-visible strands in the air, like puppet strings. “-that your boss forgot you ever even worked here.” One of the strings twitched ever so slightly, the shockwave intensified, and after a second the air settled. 

McMullen could barely speak, and looking around he noticed the same from Five. That seemed odd; Five’s harsh confidence seemed unshakable, and he definitely knew about what Allsion could do beforehand, right? “What- what-” McMullen stammered. 

“What happened to you?” Five asked, which was not the question McMullen was asking, but Allison looked confused at Five’s reaction. 

“I covered for you?” 

The disbelief on Five’s face seemed to be pushed away as he protested “Not we have to take this mess with us! I was going to ask for directions- you can’t trust anyone nowadays not to mess up the simplest things. Come on- let’s go.” Five caught up to Allison, and turned around. “You too, Toby.” Somehow, McMullen had no doubts that Allison’s rumor worked, so there was nothing left to do but pull off the apron and follow the Five and Allison, even if he didn’t like it.

McMullen headed for shotgun, but Five’s hand closed on top of his as he reached for the handle. 

“You’re like, fourteen. Get in the back seat.” McMullen tried to assert, but Five kept his hand on the handle. McMullen took two steps back and got into the backseat, and tried to scrape the remnants of spider off his shoe.

In front of him, Five and Allison were still arguing.

“You seriously still need to rest!” Allison insisted.

“I can rest later.”

“Your body’s got a limit, you know. And so does your mind- a few people I know got fucked up by one encounter with an Entity, and you’re still not telling me everything about this Jon guy and however you know that the Unknowing is coming.” Allison sighed. “But you insist on overworking yourself and making my boss go coco loco, can we at least do it in a way that doesn’t get us arrested?”  
For the first time in the fifteen minutes McMullen had known him, Five actually gave a small smile, one that was uncharacteristically nervous. “There’s the Allison who pulled me out of shit on missions.” Five’s fingers drummed on the seat, and he almost relaxed. “Now McMullen, would you tell the two of us where to find this Angela?”


	10. Pocket Sensors (Melanie)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, but here's the chapter!

_ Ding.  _ Melanie looked down at her phone. It shone, displaying a message from a friend of hers. Like all the others, it was inquiring how she managed to get shot by a ghost. 

“I mean, how does that even happen? Mel, you couldn’t even stay professional.” 

“Yeah, it’s mostly just temperature anomalies and whatever, but temperature anomalies don’t shoot you in the shoulder.” Melanie answered with a sigh. This conversation had happened a million times, and it would happen again. Looking out at the streets of London at night, Melanie didn’t know how she had messed up so much, either, so she just reitorated how weird the whole situation was and dragged her boots across the pavement. 

She looked up at the Magnus institute, remembering the time when Georgie put her in contact with the people there, saying that the Archivist usually listened. Surprise surprise, the Archivist was a weird, stoic guy Melanie did  _ not  _ get along with. He was all right, or whatever, but Jon didn’t think too highly of Melanie’s job. Well, past job. Whatever, she returned the favor.

Still, Melanie climbed up the stairs to the east wing of the Institute and knocked on the door. Silence. She stood impatiently at the door for another thirty seconds, then knocked again. 

This time, someone answered, and Melanie found herself looking at a woman she had never seen before, tall and paler than even she was with short spiky hair. 

“Oh, hey!” The new girl smiled. 

“Hey, um, I’m looking for Jonothan Sims?”

“Are you a statement-giver?” The new girl asked. 

“Um, something like that.” Melanie said. Well, it was better than saying she needed to borrow a dangerous book from the Institute library, and the only one whe Melanie had even talked to here was Jon. 

“Okay, right along.”

“I, uh, know the way to his office.” Melanie said. This new girl just smiled and stretched a hand out in the direction of the Archives and Jon’s office, as if to say  _ sure, go on.  _

Melanie started to creak the door open, but she heard Jon’s voice, and it was definitely his, except it was faster and more strained than she had ever heard it. “and I am unsure who can provide both assistance and discretion. There may be further clues on the other tapes, but so far I’ve had no word-” Not wanting to eavesdrop further but also not wanting to walk away, Melanie just pushed the door. 

Jon looked up. “Miss King-” Melanie almost rolled her eyes at Jon’s desperate attempts to cling to professionalism , “- uh – how did you, how did you get in here…?” 

“The new girl let me in. Are you alright?” 

“Hm? Sorry?”

“You look like hell.” Melanie had noticed that Jon was definitely worse for wear, and he missed enough haircuts that his hair, which was streaked with even more grey, fell almost to his shoulders. Jon also now had a series of small scars that dotted every inch o f exposed skin, and looked like he hadn’t slept in three weeks. 

“It’s been a hard few months,” It took all of Melanie’s self control to react politely to the obvious understatement, “Look, can I help you, because if you’re just after another shouting match-”

“No! I um- actually need your help.” A moment passed without Jon speaking, just studying her with brown eyes that seemed tired and given the chance almost caring, but still somehow made Melanie more unsettled than she cared to admit.

Then he spoke. “Hm, interesting,” and Melanie just saw the Jon she knew and Georgie somehow liked, just a tired man in a crumpled blazer and grandma skirt clutching a tape recorder a little too tightly. She shook off the feeling of eyes picking her apart; places like the Institute did weird things to the brain. All the paranormal influence. 

“All right, can you not be an arsehole about it? I just need access to your library.” Melanie said. She was getting a little impatient with the small talk routine.

“So talk to Diana,she runs the place.”

Melanie sighed. Now came the embarrassing part; “Yes, I don’t exactly have the academic credentials you guys demand, so I apparently need someone to vouch for me” Jon sighed, “and you’re basically the closest thing I have to a friend here.” Melanie tried to look apologetic, but it didn’t suit her. 

Jon almost scoffed. “We’ve spoken once, and we ended up screaming at each other.”

“Yes! And that’s more than I have with anyone else here.”Melanie said, “Also, uh,  _ Georgie _ actually has some nice things to say about you. That came as a surprise; you didn’t even tell me you knew her.” 

Jon looked just as confused as Melanie felt. “I – it was a long time ago. Before she started doing  _ What the Ghost. _

“Hm?”

“It’s a surprise to me as well, to be honest. We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms…”

“Hm.” Melanie said again. Even in Jon’s forced, ill-fitting academic language, he made it clear. Messy breakup, of course; Melanie could almost see it.

“What exactly do you need from us, anyway?” Jon asked, defensive. “Can’t your showbiz friends help you?” Melanie tensed up slightly at the words “showbiz friends”, and Jon definitely noticed. Whatever leftover hope Melanie had had of maybe getting on better terms with Jon, it was all but squashed. 

“No, I’m, uh – most of, most of them won’t talk to me anymore.” Melanie confessed. 

“What happened? Did word get out that you’ve given a statement to us, what was it, ‘credulous idiots?’” Jon fired at her again. He definitely hadn’t forgotten about the argument they had had. 

“Not exactly.” Silence. “Well, no. Look, in my business, your reputation is all that you have.The industry is mainly full of skeptics pretending to be believers pretending to be skeptics-”

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘charlatans’-” Jon said drily.

“Can you not? Please? I’m trying to-” Melanie vaguely waved her hand in frustration. “Look, Ghost Hunt UK split up. I mean, not formally, but well, you know, Pete was always a flake to begin with, and the others just drifted away…”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I noticed you weren’t updating anymore.” Jon’s voice was softer, and Melanie was struck by the strangeness and sincerity of it. 

“I tried to get a new crew together – but it was tough. I took to going on expeditions solo, but I don’t really have the skills to get usable footage. I saw a few weird things… then I, then I got arrested.”

“Go on.”

“Yes, I broke into the train graveyard up near Rotherham. Got picked up by his security, and I, well, I wasn’t doing well. When I was being thrown out, some late-night dog walker got a video of me screaming at them about ghosts.” Melanie let out a bitter laugh. “When it went online…”

Jon nodded. “Your all-important professional reputation went with it.” Melanie allowed herself a small sigh, and asked for directions getting out- the institute was built like a maze.

The whole conversation couldn’t have lasted more than two minutes, but at least it didn’t end in a screaming match, and Jon promised to put a word for her in with the library, even though Melanie could tell it wasn’t going to be his first priority any time soon. 

As Melanie was leaving, she heard him mutter “Not that I need any more ghosts in my life, with that arsehole working here full-time now.” Melanie wondered who ‘that areshole’ could be, and what he had to do with ghosts. 

As it turns out, she didn’t have to wonder for long, because when she couldn’t find Sasha to lead her out of the Institute, Melanie turned to the Archives on instinct and found  _ him.  _ A man around her age with hair a little longer than Jon’s in need of some maintenance, obnoxious patchwork pants, and a patterned shirt with twelve-odd paper clips and clothes pins stuck onto it at random. Strangest of all, he was talking to what seemed like thin air.

“Hey!” Melanie said. 

“Oh, hey.” the man said in an American accent that made Melanie take a second. “You a statement-giver? I’m Klaus, I work here.”

“I see. I’m a… friend of Jon’s who needs to get out. Don’t you have a dress code?” 

“We do, we do. Jon made that  _ extremely  _ clear.” Klaus smiled and tucked his hair back as he spoke, revealing a tattoo on his wrist. “Now, uh, you want out?”

“Yes, please.” At that moment, something that hadn’t happened since Turkey happened- Melanie’s pocket sensor started beeping. 

“You need to take a call?” Klaus stared at the device clipped onto Melanie’s belt. “Bit of a weird phone you’ve got there.”

“No, uh-” Melanie lifted it up, confused. “It’s my pocket sensor.” Klaus looked confused, so she explained a little sheepishly, “I have a friend who’s a bit of a tech nut, so he figured out how to make a few rudimentary sensors, the ones I usually use for work.”

“Like, meteorology? Dad made me talk to a weatherman once, I hated it.” He frowned. 

“No?” Melanie more asked than replied. Whatever this guy was going on about, he better be amazing at his job to make up for it. “I’m, aah-” she tried to frame what she did professionally, “an independent researcher who does pretty much the same stuff as the Magnus Institute, with a focus on historical ghosts.” Melanie was proud of herself for the explanation, but Klaus straightened up and his eyes narrowed.

“You’re a  _ ghost hunter. _ ” He said the words with definite disgust. 

“What-” Melanie did a double take. “Is judging my job part of yours?”

“Getting you out of here would be. You wanted the exit anyways!” Klaus tried to smile again, but it was more stained than the dreamy expression she had walked in on, and somehow more annoying. 

“That’s what I was doing. I’ll have to tell Pete the sensor’s malfunctioning.”

“Ah, probably just this place’s spooky aura.” Melanie side-eyed the American- "spooky aura"? in a professional establishment? and he walked her out into the London evening. Melanie zipped up her windbreaker and shrugged off the Institute air, silently thanking her lucky stars that at least she had the book in her future, even if nothing else was going her way. 


End file.
